Robert Moses

A Publication of the

Foundation

for Landscape Studies

A Journal of Place Volume ııı | Number ı | Fall 2007

Essays: The Landscapes of Robert Moses 3 Elizabeth Barlow Rogers: Robert Moses and the Transformation of Central Park Adrian Benepe: From Playground Tot to Parks Commissioner: My Life with Robert Moses Carol Herselle Krinsky: View from a Tower in the Park: At Home in Peter Cooper Village Elizabeth Barlow Rogers: Robert Moses and Robert Caro Redux

Book Reviews 18 Reuben M. Rainey: Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa: From Vermont to Italy in the Footsteps of George Perkins Marsh By John Elder Elizabeth Barlow Rogers: Daybooks of Discovery: Nature Diaries in Britain 1770–1870 By Mary Ellen Bellanca Nature’s Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick By Jenny Uglow

Calendar 23

Contributors 23 Letter from the Editor

his issue of tenements, he cleared slums or New York City Housing in general, and the New York Site/Lines contin- but destroyed neighbor- Authority ownership, the City Planning Commission ues the reassess- hoods. The benefit of his land they occupy is not sub- in particular. He never saw Tment of the career parks has remained essen- ject to the market forces that himself as other than a of Robert Moses tially unchallenged, although normally drive real estate pragmatic enabler of public initiated earlier this year their creation as linear development. They remain works, the man who “got with Robert Moses and the appendages to highways has islands set apart from the things done.” Private-sector Modern City: The Transforma- been criticized. rest of a city that dynamical- economic development was tion of New York, the tripar- Inevitably, the forces of ly rebuilds itself as long as not part of his purview. tite exhibition curated by political and cultural change there is a greater return on Instead, he built things for Hilary Ballon and its accom- and popular reaction served capital to be had on a given which he could obtain public panying collection of schol- to disempower this proud parcel of land. funds: roads, bridges, parks, arly essays. and arrogant public servant. Moses made the most of and subsidized housing. Moses’s grasp and reten- His authority to dramatically a remarkable opportunity to In this issue of Site/Lines, tion of power, reinforced by alter the metropolitan land- imprint New York with his we focus on the ways in his autocratic nature, scape was repudiated. Yet his multiple visions. Unlike pre- which Moses’s creation of enabled him to be the pri- legacy endures because of its sent-day New Orleans, a city facilities for public recre- mary agent reshaping New continuing practical value. in near paralysis with regard ation altered the landscape York in the mid-twentieth Without its transportation to its rebuilding plans, New of Central Park and the rest century. Anticipating post- component, the city would York’s circumstances during of New York City. Through World War II growth in cease to function. most of the forty years the eyes of one longtime automobile ownership and It also endures by its very Moses was in office favored tenant we look at life in the movement of goods by nature. Certain elements of his array of accomplish- Peter Cooper Village, his first truck, he stitched the city to the urban fabric are inher- ments. During the Great large-scale housing project its hinterlands with bridges ently resistant to change. Depression federal public and the prototype for his and highways but ignored Arterial systems represent a works programs helped fund Whitestone Bridge, July 1940. vanguard of urban America’s transformation of other mass transportation and transgenerational infrastruc- his impressive construction progress into the modern areas of residential cityscape shipment by rail. A Progres- ture that invites repair but agenda as parks commis- But these alone were not age. into superblocks of high-rise sive Era reformer who seldom alteration. Moses’s sioner. After the Second sufficient to affect the city’s For all the far-reaching housing. His role in the deplored the city’s squalid roads and bridges are World War the nation transformation. Four other grandeur of his ambitions conversion of New York embedded in New York’s enjoyed a healthy peacetime factors were key: the vision and achievements as a mas- into an automobile-served On the Cover: municipal form. Parks, economy, the city and region to conceive large-scale pro- ter builder, Moses did not metropolis is a story we Robert Moses at the dedication although sometimes were experiencing popula- jects, the ingenuity to devise pursue a comprehensive leave to others. of the Osborn Gates, Central Park, encroached upon, are also tion growth, and the Housing financing, the leadership planning vision in the con- June 15, 1953. part of the unchanging met- Act of 1949 and the Trans- capable of directing the ventional sense. He scorned ropolitan footprint. In portation Act of 1956 created political will, and the ability municipal planning boards Photo Credits: addition, Moses’s low- and large sums of available to influence public opinion. Cover, pages 2–9, and 13–14, City of middle-income residential capital that state legislatures Together these things spelled Elizabeth Barlow Rogers New York Parks and Recreation, projects are for the most part could disperse to cities. power. Historical circum- Editor courtesy of Jonathan Kuhn, Director immune to the forces of stances and attributes of Art and Antiquities. Pages 10–11, change. Protected by their unique to Moses combined Central Park Conservancy, courtesy original legal arrangements to put New York City in the of Sara Cedar Miller, Central Park Historian and Photographer. Page 16, courtesy of Alfred A. Knopf. 2 The Landscapes of Robert Moses Following on the heels of the 1893 World’s Columbian Central Park a place for active recreation. However, instead of Exposition in Chicago, where Daniel Burnham’s monumental allowing sports to take place by simply abandoning the old vision for the fairgrounds fostered a neoclassical style of archi- regulations as they had done, he dedicated portions of the tecture and landscape design, a new generation of architects park to specific activities: lawns became bowling and croquet Robert Moses and the Transformation of Central Park launched the City Beautiful movement. Its legacy in Central greens and meadows were turned into ball fields. Robert Moses enlarged and altered the New York City parks system Park is due in part to two newspaper moguls, William Discontinuing the tradition of skating on the natural ice of with a single goal: the provision of recreation facilities. There was Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. The antithesis of Vaux’s Central Park’s Pond and Lake, he built a permanent rink. an inevitable landscape design dichotomy when these were inserted Picturesque architecture, Hearst’s grandiose 1913 Maine At the time Moses came to office, the only playground in into existing historic parks. In this essay, Elizabeth Barlow Rogers Monument rises above the southwest entrance of Central Park, the park was one created in 1926 near Seventh Avenue and discusses the origins and fate of Central Park’s Moses heritage and the 1916 Pulitzer Fountain ornaments Grand Army Plaza 63rd Street, a gift from the philanthropist August Heckscher. from her perspective as the first Central Park administrator and at the southeast corner. In September 1935 nineteen fenced-off playgrounds with large founding president of the Central Park Conservancy Central Park, however, changed little in its overall appear- sandboxes – “places where children can dig” as Moses charac- ance during that time except for the wear and tear it received terized these then-novel features – were opened near park Before Moses: 1858–1934 from hosting an increasing number of celebrations and group entrances. In October of the following year, three more play- or the past thirty-five years landscape historians have activities. The onslaught of automobile traffic by the 1920s grounds were added. Enthusiastically adopted by mothers and been reviving the reputation of Frederick Law Olmsted transformed its pastoral character more completely. While the children, they were touted by Moses as a way to preserve the (1822–1903) and Calvert Vaux (1824–1895), the designers park’s naturalistic landscape had its defenders, increasingly it surrounding scenery. To further discourage romping on the Fof the Greensward Plan for Central Park and the came to be seen as a site for monuments and other encroach- grass, he encircled lawns with pipe rail fencing, posted “Keep founders of the landscape architecture profession in ments. Several bizarre proposals were put forth, including a off the Grass” signs, and made infractions of this rule punish- America. For the last twenty-five years the park itself has landing field for aircraft, a track for horse races, a central fire able by fine. enjoyed a period of restoration and good management station, a burial ground for war heroes, an opera house, and a Overlooking the Concert Ground on the Mall, the Casino through the coordinated efforts of the New York City Depart- series of trenches commemorating the 1916 Battle of Verdun. designed by Vaux as an eatery for unescorted female visitors ment of Parks and the Central Park Conservancy. This is but These multiple, unrelated proposals were symptomatic of had become a restaurant for both sexes. With the addition of a the latest chapter in the park’s checkered 150-year history . the civic leadership’s failure to understand either the park’s dance floor in the 1920s, it became a popular nightclub Central Park was conceived as a place where city dwellers scenic or recreational purposes. In 1934 this state of affairs patronized by the Tammany Hall mayor, playboy, and song- could promenade on foot or parade in carriages, enjoying the came to a decisive halt. Henceforth, one man would conceive, writer, James W. (Jimmy “Gentleman”) Walker (1881–1946). artfully conceived scenery and social spectacle. However, by the execute, and publicize every alteration of its landscape for the Moses repudiated both the former administration (Walker had early twentieth century the concept of scenic recreation – next thirty-two years. That man was Robert Moses. been thrown out of office in 1932 on charges of graft) and movement through a sequence of beautiful lawns, woods, and the current use of the building as an elite establishment. After bodies of water – was no longer considered the park’s para- The Moses Years: 1934–1960 tearing down the Casino in 1937, he converted the site into mount purpose. Samuel Parsons (1844–1923), who followed Robert Moses’s (1888–1981) vision of public service grew out of the Mary Harriman Rumsey Playground over the objections Vaux as the Parks Department’s head landscape architect from the reform movement of the Progressive Era. When he was of civic groups who felt that, with twenty-two perimeter 1898 until 1911, presided over the end of what may be called appointed by Mayor Fiorello playgrounds, another in the the park’s Greensward era, the period when the park was La Guardia (1882–1947) as middle of the park was managed according to the vision of Olmsted and Vaux. Subse- parks commissioner in 1934, unnecessary. quently, social reformers of the Progressive Era believed that Moses achieved the power to Moses’s taste in public art people needed more than simple contact with natural beauty, give permanent form to the soon became apparent. and sports-minded parks commissioners began to view early-twentieth-century com- Instead of statues commem- Central Park in a different light – as a place to play games. The missioners’ efforts to make orating important figures in profession of recreation leader was born, and a cadre of city literary, cultural, and politi- employees was hired to organize activities in parks throughout cal history, he commissioned the city in an effort to improve the health of slum children works of a whimsical nature, and help them move into the American cultural mainstream. Lower East Side playground atten- dant watching children digging, January 1941. The play equipment seen here – swings, slide, and monkey bars set in sand – became standard in all Moses-era play- grounds throughout the city, includ- ing those in Central Park. 3 most of which were based on children’s stories. In 1938 he In the north end of the park, Moses tore down the 1899 musical performances designed to attract a variety of ethnic used Works Progress Administration (W.P.A.) funds to erect a glasshouses near Fifth Avenue and 104th Street and directed groups were held, including German, Gaelic, Polish, and granite statue of Mother Goose by Frederick George Richard Clarke to transform the surrounding six acres into the Scottish songfests. There were Victor Herbert recitals as well, Roth (1872–1944). With soaring cloak, she sits astride a flying Conservatory Garden. As with the Great Lawn, Beaux-Arts and the craze for big band music prompted the introduction goose at the entrance to the Rumsey Playground. The statue’s symmetry prevailed. The garden has a central lawn bordered of dance contests. bas-relief base depicts Little Jack Horner, Humpty Dumpty, by allées of crab apple trees and is terminated by a fountain jet During the 1940s, as federal funds were directed toward the and Little Bo Peep. Additionally, near the entrance to the and a semicircle of hedges stepping up in tiers to a terrace war effort, Moses was unable to lavish recreational facilities on Heckscher Playground, which Moses rebuilt in 1935, he placed crowned with a wisteria-covered, wrought-iron pergola. A large the city as generously as when manpower was supplied by the a granite drinking fountain decorated with bas-reliefs of char- circular garden on the north for seasonal display is balanced federal public works programs of the Great Depression. acters from Alice in Wonderland as a memorial to social by a garden of geometrically arranged perennial beds on However, within the limits of the city budget, parks depart- worker Sophie Irene Loeb (1876–1929). In 1937 he had a playful the south. In 1936 Bessie Potter Vonnoh’s fountain sculpture ment engineers and the regular workforce were able to pair of life-size bronzes, Dancing Bear and Dancing Goat, of Mary and Dickon, the protagonists in Frances Hodgson undertake a number of routine maintenance operations and also by Roth, installed at the entrance to the zoo he had built Burnett’s well-loved children’s story The Secret Garden, was perform small capital projects: the reseeding of lawns, the to replace the park’s old menagerie. installed in the pool in the south garden. The 1910 Untermyer addition of asphalt paths and parking lots, and the repair of Tennis courts and a tennis house, built in 1930 accord- Fountain by Walter Schott featuring jets of water splashing broken benches and lights. These improvements were intend- ing to the design of the park engineer Gustavo Steinacher, on bronze dancing maidens, was donated in 1947 to ornament ed to enhance security, increase safety, augment automobile encroached on the South Meadow near the 96th Street the pool in the north garden. access, and signal that management was on the job. During Transverse Road. Before Moses this was the sole dedicated To make the park more actively family oriented, Moses this time, Moses filled in Ladies Pond, the most westerly arm sports complex in the park. In 1934, during his first year in staged events on the Concert Ground at the Mall where the of the Lake, and in 1941, when he had the 65th Street Cross office, he turned the nearby North Meadow into ball fields and 1923 Naumburg Bandshell had Drive realigned for the convenience of automobile traffic, he the adjacent stables into a recreation center, and he encircled Harvest Moon Dance, Naumburg been built to replace an earlier buried Marble Arch, the pedestrian underpass leading to and the crest of the Great Hill with a wide path for rollerskating. Bandshell, September 10, 1946. cast-iron bandstand. Here from the Mall. He converted Cherry Hill Concourse, designed Inside this asphalt ring hard sand courts for roque, a version by Olmsted and Vaux as a of croquet, were laid out, and wickets for regular croquet were carriage turnaround with an set up on nearby lawns. During that same year, the sheepfold ornamental central fountain that housed the flock that grazed on Sheep Meadow was con- used for watering horses, verted into the Tavern on the Green, and the following year into a parking lot. He another restaurant was placed in the Bethesda Terrace Arcade. marked the sites of the forts Vaux’s stable fronting the 86th Street Transverse Road became built by militiamen at the a police station, and the park was subsequently patrolled by onset of the War of 1812 by officers charged with enforcing Moses’s rules and regulations. clearing the woods in the The Old Reservoir between the 79th and 86th Street north end of the park and Transverse Roads that predated the park’s creation had been installing flagpoles, pave- filled in during the 1920s when a new water tunnel made it ment, and benches. Nature obsolete. The American Society of Landscape Architects had lovers protested the destruc- prepared an axial plan in the Beaux-Arts style to turn the area tion of the park’s naturalistic into the Great Lawn, but it was not implemented until 1936, character, but with no public two years after Moses took office. Its principal designer was accountability to restrict Gilmore D. Clarke (1892–1982), Moses’s chief landscape archi- his authority, Moses was able tect for many years. Not long after its completion Moses decid- to remove trees and pave ed that Clarke’s grass oval should be converted into eight ball over areas with impunity. fields.

4 To put it mildly, the architects, landscape architects, and Robert Moses at the dedication of bands of brick and limestone engineers working in the parks department’s Arsenal head- the Great Lawn, July 6, 1934. masonry, a polygonal rather quarters during the Moses years had a different aesthetic from than rectilinear plan, and a those who had designed the park in the nineteenth century. cupola to collect the angles of a hip roof into a peaked topknot They reengineered the park’s water bodies, rimming their characterize many small parks structures of the Moses period. edges with riprap and perimeter paths of asphalt, destroying These buildings were built to be as sturdy and vandalproof as naturalistic shorelines fringed with emergent vegetation. The the house of the wisest pig in “The Three Little Pigs.” Harlem Meer, the placid lake near 110th Street, and the Pond In 1950 a fire destroyed the Carousel, a longtime favorite in the southeast corner received this treatment in the early park concession. Moses soon located a handsome forty-year- 1940s. Lewis Mumford, the most eminent architectural writer old Coney Island carousel with horses carved of applewood by of the day, complained: the noted Brooklyn carousel makers Sol Stein and Harry Goldstein. He had a new motor installed and, with a gift of H. G. Wells once described Sidney Webb, the trenchant $2,000, purchased a Wurlitzer band organ. The parks director British bureaucrat, as the kind of person who would hack of mechanical maintenance oversaw the repainting of the down growing trees and substitute sanitary green glass carousel’s fifty-seven prancing steeds in what he called “real umbrellas. There is someone in the planning office of our horsy colors.” Moses obtained a gift from the Michael Fried- Parks Department whose mind works the same way. Even sam Foundation to erect the brick-and-limestone-striped in a romantic setting, he favors firm, manmade bound- octagonal building that houses the carousel today. aries – iron fences, concrete curbs, heavy wooden barriers, The same year Moses turned to the financier, presidential devices that Olmsted and his architect-partner, Calvert advisor, and statesman Bernard Baruch (1870–1965), whose Vaux, except in such formal layouts as the Mall, did their favorite spot for discussing governmental affairs was a park best to avoid. As for the borders of the lake, instead of bench in Central Park, for funds to build the Chess and planting them thickly with sedge and iris, the Parks Checkers House on the site previously occupied by the grand- Department designer has tried to combine beauty with ease est of the park’s original rustic summerhouses. In the mean- of maintenance by planting them, too, with slabs of stone. time, the adjacent Dairy, one of Vaux’s original buildings, was The result is damnably neat, but that is about all, for the converted into a storage depot for workers’ tools and supplies. wide, asphalted paths and stone embankments completely In 1954, when Jeanne Kerbs, who lived in an apartment counteract the natural loveliness of the landscape. and designers exactly what he wanted: playful statues and house overlooking the Conservatory Water near Fifth Avenue This was done in conjunction with the construction of the sound, functional, modern structures conservatively clothed at 74th Street, wished to memorialize her parents, Moses Wollman Rink on the northeastern arm of the Pond. To secure and with touches of whimsy. Aymar Embury II (1880–1966), solicited her donation for the construction of a boathouse for funding for this project, Moses found time to take walks who had been recruited in 1934 along with Clarke to be a model yachts. Relatively small in scale, this typical Moses in Central Park with Justice Samuel J. Harris, the lawyer for member of the newly formed parks department design and building has brick walls with limestone quoins and a steeply Kate Wollman, principal trustee of the William J. Wollman construction department, was the principal author of this pitched, gently curving hip roof of copper crowned with a Foundation, named in honor of the brother whose fortune she architectural idiom of disciplined playfulness. He and his tall, thin, ornamental cupola. Also in 1954, in order to replace had inherited. With the help of his friend the judge, Moses team believed in using traditional materials of the highest the twenty-nine-year-old wooden boathouse on the northeast persuaded her to give $600,000 toward the $800,000 cost of quality, often brick and limestone in combination, or rough- arm of the Lake, Moses successfully sought funds from invest- building the rink. hewn fieldstone with limestone trim. Attention to detail was ment banker Carl M. Loeb, who donated $250,000, almost the Throughout the 1950s Moses continued to combine private important. A patterned surface composed of alternating entire amount needed to build the boathouse that is named philanthropy with city appropriations to build other projects for him and his wife Adeline. In 1957 Moses demolished in Central Park: new structures for park concessions, public another original park structure, the Mineral Springs Pavilion toilets (euphemistically called comfort stations to this day), at the northwest corner of Sheep Meadow, replacing it with more playgrounds, a new boathouse on the Lake, a rebuilt Carousel. He adroitly steered prospective donors toward the kind of sculpture and architecture he liked and told artists

5 the present one built according to his stan- Robert Moses at the dedication of the playground was replaced in dard design template. Alice and Wonderland, May 7, 1959. 1990 by the new Pat Hoffman In 1953 Moses accepted $75,000 raised Friedman Playground situated by the Danish-American Women’s Associa- closer to Fifth Avenue, the Levy gates were integrated into its tion for a bronze statue by Georg Lober to design, along with Samuel Friedman’s gift of Manship’s 1960 commemorate the 150th anniversary of Hans Group of Bears. Christian Andersen’s birth. His conservative Moses, who had served under several successive New York taste for storybook sculpture was doubly governors, encouraged Governor Herbert H. Lehman apparent because of his vociferous opposi- (1878–1963) and his wife to donate the Lehman Children’s Zoo, tion that same year to a modern playground north of the main Central Park Zoo, in honor of the couple’s designed by the sculptor Isamu Noguchi for fiftieth anniversary in 1961. Lehman had just been elected a site next to the new United Nations. Such governor when Moses built the original zoo in 1934 as an act was Moses’s influence at this time that the of friendship toward his political patron, Alfred E. Smith design was withdrawn, even though the play- (1873–1944), Lehman’s immediate predecessor. Smith took great ground was not on city parkland. Dedicated delight in walking from his apartment across Fifth Avenue in 1956 and placed on the west side of the to visit the animals almost every day. The enormously popular Conserva-tory Water opposite the Kerbs Lehman Children’s Zoo was a juvenile stage set in which Model Yacht Boathouse, the Hans Christian live animals were penned and petted. Manship’s entrance gates Andersen sculpture depicts “The Ugly depicting a youth dancing to the music of panpipes are of a Duckling” advancing toward the larger-than- much higher artistic quality than was the theme-parklike zoo, life-size figure of the genial author dressed which was redesigned in 1996 when it came under the man- in a frock coat and seated with an open book agement of the Wildlife Conservation Society. on his lap. The storyteller’s knees and the invitingly spread Manship (1885–1966) designed its handsome bronze entrance By the mid-1950s Moses’s arrogant sarcasm, political power, pages of his book are now shiny where generations of climb- gates depicting “The Tortoise and Hare” and “The Wolf and and press connections, which had previously withered oppo- ing children have worn away the patina. the Lamb” along with other animals from Aesop’s Fables. The nents, were unable to mute the voices of those who could no The northern end of the Conservatory Water received the gates were removed when the playground was demolished in longer tolerate his autocratic style. In addition, his preference last and best loved piece of Moses-era sculpture, José de 1978 to make way for the Metropolitan Museum’s addition to for landscape utility over scenery came under attack from the Creeft’s bronze Alice in Wonderland given in 1959 by George T. house the Temple of Dendur. They have recently been cleaned nascent environmental and historic preservation movements. Delacorte (1894–1991), the millionaire founder of the Dell and repaired by the Central Park Conservancy and readied While civic organizations like the Parks Association had raised Publishing Company, in memory of his wife Margarita. The for installation at the entrance to the Ancient Playground at objections to projects such as the Rumsey Playground with March Hare, Mad Hatter, and dormouse crowding around Fifth Avenue and 85th Street. respectful diffidence in the 1930s, they now called Moses’s con- Alice, who is enthroned on a huge mushroom, resemble those In 1957 the Irving and Estelle Levy Foundation provided tinuing addition of recreational facilities to Central Park in John Tenniel’s illustrations for the original edition of Lewis funds for a small rectangular playground to be built south of unwanted encroachments. Carroll’s famous book. While they are clearly in character, the the Metropolitan Museum near the 79th Street Transverse Things came to a dramatic head in 1955 when the newspa- Mad Hatter possesses Delacorte’s features, and Alice is thought Road. Like the Osborn Playground, it was furnished with stan- pers announced that Moses wished to build an “Oldsters to resemble de Creeft’s daughter Donna. Although at least one dard play equipment – swings, slide, see-saws, sandbox – and Center” in the Ramble for persons over fifty-five. The project art critic characterized Moses’s taste in public art as puerile, entered through specially commissioned, animal-ornamented would transform the prevailing character of the twenty-two- the surface gleam of the mushroom and Alice’s outstretched bronze gates. A memorial to Irving Levy, they were designed acre woodland into a bland expanse of open lawns dotted with arms and fingers testifies to the statue’s perennial popularity. by sculptor A. Walter Beretta and architect John Wilson. When chess-and-checkers tables and areas for horseshoe pitching, In 1952 a memorial playground honoring William Church croquet, and shuffleboard. The center was to be funded with a Osborn (1862–1951), a former president of the Metropolitan gift of $250,000 from the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation Museum of Art, was built at Fifth Avenue and 84th Street. Paul in honor of Albert’s sister, social worker Florina Lasker. The relandscaping of the Ramble would be accomplished with $200,000 from the city budget. Moses said that it was neces-

6 sary to fence the area. Serious bird watchers would be allowed to refer to jokingly as the “Fruited Plain” or “Men’s Meadow.” tree, other women wept, and photographers took pictures of to enter in the early morning hours and “orderly adults” dur- Perceiving a lack of support from the press and the strength of the scene. While Moses brushed off the controversy as an ing the rest of the day. the political forces against him, Moses dropped the project, inconsequential flap over a mere half-acre and a few trees, his The Ramble was, in fact, in terrible condition, weedy and and the Lasker gift was withdrawn. publicity went from bad to worse. Better connected than the eroded because of lack of maintenance. To prepare for the An even more contentious battle arose in 1956 with more poor whose neighborhoods he displaced by slum clearance changes to come, paths were repaved and lined with London lasting damage to Moses’s reputation. Always at pains to projects elsewhere, the mothers had lawyer friends to help plane trees, standard parks department construction elements increase the convenience of motorists in the park, he wished them obtain an injunction halting work pending a judicial such as pipe railings and concrete retaining walls were to supplement the existing parking at the Tavern on the Green hearing. installed, and a parking lot was built beside the East Drive. with the addition of another eighty spaces. A group of mothers While Moses was on vacation, the opposition swelled. More Couched as a tactic against “anti-social persons,” the proposal whose children played in the area got wind of his plans. On reasons were found to oppose his heretofore unassailable was probably designed to put a stop to gay cruising. But the April 20 they angrily faced down the bulldozer operators authority over all parkland – authority he had helped write Ramble is also a major bird-watching area. Located on the beginning to clear the site of vegetation. Two days later they into the city charter. Recalling one of his motives for tearing Atlantic flyway, it serves as a nesting ground and feeding received the backing of the Citizens Union. Undeterred, Moses down the Casino in 1934, opponents argued that Tavern station where migrant species refuel on their spring and fall denied the mothers’ request for a public hearing and, as a sop, on the Green was a pricey restaurant that average park visitors journeys. With his dismissive contempt for bird watchers, offered their children the right to roller skate on the parking could not afford to patronize. Moreover, parking spaces that Moses was surprised when the Linnaean Society assembled lot before 5 p.m. On April 25, when the women arrived to benefited a private concessionaire were a questionable use of enough strength and political backing to successfully oppose protest, they found thirty workmen and twenty-five policemen public parkland. A taxpayers’ suit was filed. When Moses his plan to tear out the vegetation that camouflaged activities with orders to restrain them from entering the area, which returned, he learned that the city’s corporation counsel, Peter taking place in the Ramble’s bosky hollows. Its members had been cordoned off with snow fencing overnight. Campbell Brown, had worked out an arrangement with the were further outraged by his plan to build a large recreation The press, which for years had been in thrall to Moses’s mothers’ attorney, Louis N. Field, to delay the case until the center equipped with a food bar and rooms for TV, music, powerful public relations machinery, now saw the mothers up furor had subsided and Moses could announce that he was and games on the lovely lawn that some park regulars used against the bulldozers as more than good copy: this was a story building a playground instead of a parking lot on the site. On that showed that the parks July 18 the Times ran a story under the galling headline “Moses hero they had lauded, the Yields to Mothers after Litigation,” quoting Field’s winner’s man who had been idolized compliment: “Bob Moses has gone overboard and is going by the public for so long, all out to do the right thing.” This was a public relations had feet of clay. The April 26 blow from which Moses’s image as a great park builder never New York Times revealed recovered. that “Commissioner Moses, Two other humiliating defeats lay ahead. In 1954 Moses though he did not personally allowed Joseph Papp (1921–1991), the founder of the New York supervise operations, com- Shakespeare Festival, to hold performances in the park, but manded one bulldozer, after agreeing to support the construction of a permanent one power shovel, two dump summer theater, Moses subsequently backed away. Stuart trucks, pneumatic drills, Constable, the man whom he had appointed as the executive charges of dynamite, gaso- director of the parks department, started a smear campaign line chain saws, pickaxes, based on Papp’s suspected communism (Papp had earlier shovels, axes, hatchets, and refused to testify at a hearing by the Committee on Un-Ameri- ropes.” One mother was can Activities of the House of Representatives). Moses felt forcibly restrained by a policeman as a workman finished hacking down a

Central Park Casino, September 1935. Moses tore down the Casino two years later and replaced it with the Mary Harriman Rumsey Playground. At the same time he converted the sheepfold adjacent to the Sheep Meadow into Tavern on the Green. 7 compelled to support Constable, and he now tried to block the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadow Park. Morris and his After Moses: 1965–1978 project through a series of bureaucratic and budgetary maneu- successors were therefore left to deal with the café fight and As Lindsay’s first parks commissioner, Hoving, who had vers designed make the theater, which he had originally been the building of the park’s last large-scale Moses-era recreation gained his appointment by writing a white paper on parks willing to fund with city money, unaffordable for Papp’s shoe- facility, the Lasker Rink and Pool. With regard to the café, during the mayoral campaign, trumpeted the dawn of a new string organization. Papp, a child of the slums, was a skilled the Court of Appeals, which had long upheld the authority day, saying that his administration would make “an all-out street fighter with a passionately democratic vision: free over all parks-related matters given to the parks commissioner attack on a kind of repetitive, conservative design associated Shakespeare. He was able to garner extraordinarily favorable by the City Charter, did not do so now. On April 27, 1962, it with the parks department since the Depression days of the press, and like the playground mothers, he took Moses handed down an affirmative verdict for the prosecution that W.P.A. that critics have alternately called naïve or Neanderthal.” to court. Philanthropist George Delacorte decided to come to marked the beginning of citizen protection of the park as Moses, who was more used to being insulting than insulted, the rescue, and once more litigation was averted. On January a scenic landscape. was incensed when Hoving told him to his face, “Your design 25, 1961, Newbold Morris (1902–1966), Moses’s successor as Hartford, however, did not give up his dream of bringing a is absolutely appalling and you never gave a damn for the parks commissioner, accepted the philanthropist’s unsolicited Parisian-style sidewalk café to New York. He directed Stone community.” The former curator of medieval art and soon-to- gift of $150,000, the balance needed to supplement the to modify the design in the hope that the project might still be director of the Metropolitan Museum, proclaimed: “We’ve $225,000 appropriation approved by the Board of Estimate. On go forward, but the election of John V. Lindsay (1921–2000) got to get back to the concept that a park is a work of art.” June 18, 1962, the new 2,500-seat outdoor Delacorte Theater, as mayor in 1965 sealed its doom. A month after Lindsay took To further this perspective he appointed an architectural his- situated beside the Belvedere Lake (today called Turtle Pond), office, his brash parks commissioner, Thomas Pearsall Field torian, Henry Hope Reed (b. 1916), as curator of Central Park, opened with a benefit production of “The Merchant of Hoving (b. 1931), son of Walter Hoving, declared, “We just have an unsalaried advisory position. “Moses men” not protected by Venice.” The funds collected would support the summer’s free to be resolute about some things. One, two, three – bang!” their civil service status were dismissed, and in their place performances. Papp declared the event a people’s victory, and Hartford complained, “Moses suggested the location, and he Hoving assembled a staff whose ages ranged from twenty-four Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr. (1910–1991) praised Papp’s persis- is a very great man. . . . He knew a hell of a lot better than to thirty-four, his own age. “We’re boiling up a creative pot, an tence. anyone else.” Hoving tried to persuade Hartford to redirect indication of a new era,” he exclaimed. In 1960 Moses made his last stand in Central Park in his $800,000-dollar gift to his own pet project, the building While previously the only women in the Arsenal were secre- defense of a proposed gift from Huntington Hartford (b. 1911), of twenty vest-pocket parks, but Hartford declined, and on taries, Mary Perot Nichols, an editor of the Village Voice, was the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (A&P) heir. Hartford March 4, 1966, Hoving asked the city comptroller to return hired to manage press relations. Hoving also hired Henry wanted to build a café in the southeast corner of the park, and the money. Stern, a thirty-year-old lawyer who would one day become Moses agreed to accept architect Edward Durrell Stone’s By contrast, at the opposite end of the park, the $2.6 mil- parks commissioner, to serve as executive director and counsel design, “a flat-topped double-decker of concrete, with sliding lion combined rink and pool proposed as a memorial to with the mandate “to bring back the opportunity for imagina- glass doors that can be opened on the park side and along the Albert and Florina Lasker’s sister Loula, for which the Albert tion, taste, and creative design that existed in the nineteenth 59th Street sidewalk.” Intended to serve five hundred diners, it and Mary Lasker Foundation had provided $600,000, went for- century.” Hoving persuaded Delacorte’s Make New York Beauti- was 240 feet long by 40 feet wide. Four civic organizations ward. It was poorly sited in at the mouth of the Loch, the ful Foundation to underwrite a contract for new signage with protested, but Moses reminded them that the city charter gave stream that empties into the Meer after flowing from the Pool Milton Glaser’s Push Pin Studios. He invited Pratt, Columbia, the parks commissioner the authority to accept gifts without through the scenic ravine traversing the northern end of the and other schools of architecture and landscape architecture the approval of any other city official. Nevertheless, Walter park. Although it would prove as popular in the summer as to engage students in studio projects involving innovations in Hoving, the chairman of Tiffany & Co., and a group of fellow the other big, well-managed swimming pools Moses had lav- park design. Hoving also met with community leaders in merchants filed a law suit protesting the park incursion. ished on the city and in the winter give skaters a less crowded East Harlem to say that from now on there would be town hall Giving voice to the growing notion of Moses as an autocrat, alternative to the Wollman Rink, this intrusion presented a meetings to hear what kind of parks people wanted. Hoving declared: “Some officials in office a long time seem to dire contrast to the area’s sylvan scenery. This time, however, Lindsay’s and Hoving’s most significant contribution to get a sovereignty complex. . . . Not only do they feel they know the protests of park preservationists were ineffectual. When Central Park was to initiate a ban on automobiles during cer- better than the rest of us taxpayers, but they ride roughshod the rink was dedicated on December 21, 1966, Mayor Lindsay tain hours of the day. Announced as an experiment on March sometimes, notably Robert Moses, whose fine work for many and Thomas Hoving, the self-declared enemy of park 1, 1966, this set off a protracted fight with the traffic commis- years I have applauded, but whose habitual arrogance, particu- encroachments, took a whirl on the ice. sioner, Henry A. Barnes. In April Barnes agreed to compro- larly in this situation, I decry.” mise by permitting traffic closings for the sole purpose By this time Moses was on the verge of retiring as parks of bike races. This concession, which was enthusiastically sup- commissioner in order to serve as coordinator of the ported in newspaper editorials, drove the traffic agency, the Automobile Club of New York, and the Taxi and Limousine

8 Commission repeatedly back to the Parks Department confer- fear that the park had become unsafe at night: “It’s my respon- arena on the Great Lawn and a thousand-seat below-ground ence table. The environmentalists’ goal to relieve the vegeta- sibility to make it so exciting that people will come there arena was aborted. The task of championing the stable fell tion of heavy doses of carbon monoxide gained increased in droves, and that also is protection.” He did not foresee the to his successor, August Heckscher (1913– 1997), a former con- support. Over the years the park was progressively closed to extent to which his “attractions to draw teen-agers” would sultant to President Kennedy on the arts. After Heckscher automobile traffic for longer hours until the current policy stimulate the consumption of alcohol and the sale of drugs in took office in 1967, he declared that the project would “capture was achieved: weekends year-round and weekdays in warm the park nor the effect this would have on the park’s landscape the ceremonial significance of equestrian sports.” Defenders weather, except during the morning and late-afternoon rush and safety. of the park fought against turning the area over to polo players. hours. Happenings could be artistic as well as musical. On May 16, Heckscher continued to promote the below-ground arena Hoving’s happenings, as they were called, were another 1966, the Times reported a Hoving Happening featuring a designated for training police horses, but by 1970, with dwin- matter. Thanks to Nichols’s frequent press releases and 105-yard-long canvas set up below the Metropolitan Museum dling city funds for capital projects, the proposal was dropped, Hoving’s flair for colorful statements, these events became of Art for a “cartoon performance.” As he doodled a caricature and opponents were able to celebrate another victory in the topics of the moment. During the same period the Times was of himself over the slogan “Three Cheers for Fred L. Olmsted,” fight to stem encroachments on Central Park’s landscape. supporting the traffic closings, it carried the headline: Hoving cried, “It’s marvelous. It lets people come in and Heckscher continued to pursue the course set by Hoving, smash away.” At such high-profile occasions it did not seem to and the park remained the venue of choice for mass events. Old Central Park Will Rock ‘n’ Roll matter that vandals were smashing away in more destructive Nor was he opposed to happenings. One of his first initiatives Go-Go Concerts and Dancing to Discotheque Combos ways elsewhere in the park. Without Moses’s control over the in office was to discuss the possibility of an archaeological Planned for Summer park police, rules were no longer enforced and muggings and “occurrence” with the Israeli government. “The idea,” he said, Hoving Thinks Attractions Will Draw Teen-Agers other more serious crimes were on the rise. Hoving’s cartoon “is to erect a mound and fill it with several thousand shards of and Make Park Areas Safer performance anticipated the avant guarde’s appreciation of ancient pottery, statuary, and glass, which the Israeli govern- Always ready to direct a jab at Moses, Hoving said, “We’re graffiti as a form of public art. ment is contributing, and then let kids dig for it.” This never going to open it up and have a little bit of – how shall we call At the West 67th Street Playground, site of the victory of the took place, but many other events did. Ron Delsner, the impre- it – Central Park à Go Go. . . . No longer are we going to mothers to save their corner of the park, Hoving was able to sario of the Rheingold Central Park Music Festival, staged over restrict ourselves to square dancing and ballroom dancing.” He abolish the conventional slides, swings, and seesaws of the sixty programs during the summer of 1967. With overflow began meeting with professional pop concert booking agents standard Moses playground. A gift from the Estée and Joseph audiences on the slopes around the Wollman Rink five nights and soon announced that Lauder Foundation allowed a week, erosion took its toll, leaving only bare dirt patterned by Central Park would host “the him to hire the architect runnels from the rain. largest outdoor music festi- Richard Dattner to design an Yet the concerts continued. Heckscher disapproved of flag val in the world.” “adventure playground.” burning by anti-Vietnam War protestors in the park but was in During the summer of With characteristic anti- favor of other kinds of events: an Easter “yippee” event; a 1966 and in subsequent Moses disdain, he pro- kite-flying event; a Ringling Brothers parade to announce the years, Wollman Rink operat- nounced it “a radical circus coming to town; “be-ins,” mass rallies, concerts, and ed as the venue for rock ‘n’ departure from the junk other large-scale events on the Sheep Meadow; and a contin- roll, jazz, folk, pop, and we’ve had all these years.” gent of the Poor People’s March on Washington. A 1969 New ethnic music concerts spon- Like Moses, Hoving Year’s Eve party for 2,000 offered fireworks, rock music by sored by Rheingold Brew- learned during his fourteen the Mighty Mellotones, and dancing at the Bethesda Fountain. eries. Overlooking the objec- months in office that big There was even a mass vigil on July 20, 1969, the eve of the tions of his Central Park dreams for transforming moon landing. “I’m asking everybody to come dressed in curator, Hoving played on Central Park can go down in white,” Heckscher announced, “and we’re working with the the public’s now justifiable defeat. He had resigned as broadcasting companies to have live TV or huge screens, so parks commissioner to great crowds can participate in this wonderful moment.” become the director of the Because of mass events and unregulated sports use, by this Metropolitan Museum of Art time the Sheep Meadow was a dust bowl. In 1966 Restaurant by the time his proposal to build a $6.4 million stable with a three-hundred-seat

Vietnam War protester, Central Park, August 9, 1969. 9 sledding slope near Fifth Avenue and 78th Restoring the Olmsted and Moses Park: 1979–Today Street. Hemlocks were planted to partially The election of Edward I. Koch (b. 1924) in 1978 as mayor sig- screen the wooden fence that protected the naled hope for the Central Park’s rescue. Koch’s first parks work site, but this did not alter that fact that commissioner, Gordon J. Davis (b. 1941), believed the park to the north side of the hill remained off-limits be a great work of landscape art and called it “one of the great- to the public for more than twenty years as est achievements of American civilization, clearly in the same construction slowly progressed. In the early category as ‘Moby Dick’ or the invention of jazz,” adding that 1980s the park was further penetrated below its real glory lay in its role as the city’s most democratic public ground at 63rd Street and Fifth Avenue space. To put the park in the forefront of his administration’s with the boring of a new fifteen-hundred-foot agenda, the commissioner decided to place Central Park’s subway tunnel. operations under a single individual rather than the depart- Budget cuts exacerbated the park’s woes ment’s chain of command. Because I was one of the principal at this time, and the Lindsay administration advocates of the park’s restoration, he appointed me to the began to use funds from the city’s capital newly created position of Central Park administrator in 1979. budget to cover the operating costs of the The mayor and commissioner subsequently endorsed my parks. The workforce diminished through idea of a citizen-led not-for-profit organization acting as a attrition as employees retired and their posi- day-to-day management participant with city government, and tions were left vacant. Management was in 1980 the Central Park Conservancy was formed. virtually suspended as the plethora of events The initial mission of the conservancy was “to make and the lack of a policy for rules enforcement Central Park clean, safe, and beautiful,” and one of its first acts demoralized the remaining workers. Broken was to undertake a comprehensive management and restora- By the mid-1970s, Central Park’s Associates was given a con- benches, lights, and play equipment; trees left unpruned tion plan. The plan prepared by the conservancy’s landscape meadows and lawns were bare, cession permit to turn the with roots exposed by erosion; compacted soil incapable of designers and consultants between 1982 and 1985 analyzed, compacted dirt, with standing water Bethesda Terrace into an supporting anything other than the hardiest weeds; ubiqui- inventoried, and recorded in words and graphics the condition because of the collapsed drainage al fresco café, which continued tous graffiti – all were the results of the park’s go-go years. Nor of trees, lawns, meadows, architecture, soil, bodies of water, system. operation until 1974 when ram- would things get better during the mayoralty of Abraham bridle trails, paths, and drives. By looking at the park as a uni- pant drug dealing on the Beame as the city approached bankruptcy and entered a pro- tary work of landscape design and at the activities and patterns fast-eroding surrounding slopes caused it to cease operation. tracted state of fiscal crisis. of use by its visitors, we were able to chart the repairs needed The Terrace came to resemble a bazaar, populated by illegal With increasing cuts in the parks budget as the heavy to restore its extensive infrastructure of roadways, paths, cast vendors hawking a variety of merchandise. Its balustrade spending of the Lindsay years was curtailed, prestige drained iron bridges, stone arches, drains, and conduits. We also ana- finials were knocked off, and the intricately carved stairway from the office of commissioner, and the job was handed over lyzed the park as an interrelated series of scenic experiences side panels were vandalized and slathered with graffiti. The to a series of career civil-service employees. The administra- and mapped its vistas and view lines. Its landscape had not boathouse on the Harlem Meer that Moses had built in the tion was staffed through patronage appointments dictated by been seen in this holistic way since Olmsted and Vaux’s prepa- mid-1940s became a restaurant in 1973, but shaky finances city hall, and the playground attendants disappeared, as did ration of the Greensward Plan in 1857. We learned from our forced it to close the following year, leaving the building prey the trained gardeners. The Central Park police precinct aban- user study that most visitors come to the park simply to walk to vandals. It soon became a charred ruin. doned its policy of enforcing park rules and regulations, and and relax. While we did not propose removing any of Moses’s Without Moses’s indomitable ability to face down the officers in squad cars patrolled only the dri- recreational facilities, the heads of other city agencies, Heckscher allowed a permit to be ves. Interviewed in 1975, Richard M. Clurman, days of parceling the park into granted to the Department of Environmental Protection in the former chief of correspondents of the discrete areas dedicated to 1970 to dig a shaft and construct a valve chamber for New York Time-Life News Service who had served as specific recreational uses was City’s Water Tunnel No. 3 on 1.2 acres of Cedar Hill, a favorite commissioner during the last year of the over. Lindsay administration, summed up the situ- ation, “You’ve got to start managing people and equipment much more. Park workers have no goals. They have no targets. There is Harlem Meer Boathouse, 1980s. simply no management of routine work.” Notice the heavily engineered Moses shoreline bordered by silt and debris. Parts of the copper roof have been removed by vandals, and the interior 10 has been gutted by fire. Like Olmsted and Vaux, we saw commitment to ongoing projects must be submitted to the Landmarks Preservation In 1984 Stern created the Natural Resources Group to over- management as essential. Strategies for erosion control; the Commission for design review. see the protection of wetlands and other ecologically impor- creation of horticultural crews for pruning, planting, and turf The preservationist spirit of the times helped further the tant areas. He promoted the reintroduction of native plants care; and the assignment of section supervisors and zone attention now being given to the park’s long-neglected origi- and wildlife and initiated an environmental pledge of alle- gardeners accountable for the maintenance of specific areas – nal architecture. In 1982 Vaux’s Dairy was reopened as a giance, which he had audiences recite at dedications and other all of these management innovations needed to proceed in visitor center after its loggia and high-ceilinged interior were park ceremonies. He also conjunction with individual restoration projects. The plan also restored. In 1984 private donors helped fund the $3.8 million Looking south across the Great sought to further limit called for renewing standards of cleanliness throughout the renovation of the ornamental stonework at the Bethesda Lawn today. destructive mass events while park, including those for comfort stations, which often stank Terrace and the resodding and replanting of its badly eroded of urine, were hardly ever supplied with toilet paper, and were surrounding slopes. The circular carriage turnaround at frequently used for illicit sex. A special graffiti removal crew Cherry Hill, which Moses had converted to a parking lot, was was established to eliminate 50,000 square yards of accumulat- turned back into parkland. Both the Bethesda Fountain ed graffiti and erase fresh tags as fast as they appeared. The and the Cherry Hill Fountain were repaired and made to flow cleaning and repatinating of bronze sculpture and the repair once more. The abandoned Belvedere, once occupied by of broken fountains were additional means of signaling of a U.S. Weather Service meteorologists, was rescued from near new level of park care. destruction by vandals. Its Victorian Gothic roof and terrace It was clear from the beginning of our efforts that the man- loggias were rebuilt, and its interior was made into an envi- agement and restoration plan had a historic preservationist ronmental education center. A small concession building, bias. Yet many Moses facilities were still immensely popular designed as a contemporary interpretation of Vaux’s style, was and heavily used. Robert Moses’s park was now a permanent constructed on the foundation of the Ballplayers House, layer on top of the original scenic park, and the plan necessar- an original park building demolished in 1969 after a fire. The ily respected both. Returning ball fields to Olmstedian mead- conservancy’s restoration crew built two rustic shelters ows or removing any of the park’s perimeter playgrounds like the ones that once crowned the park’s large outcrops of would have met with vehement opposition from their con- Manhattan schist. The Moses-era elements in the north stituencies. The challenge for the restoration planners was to end that were restored or replaced include the Conservatory synthesize two opposing philosophies and aesthetics of park Garden, the park’s first endowed landscape, and the Dana design into a reasonably harmonious whole. Discovery Center for nature education near the site of the Whereas Hoving and Heckscher, like Moses, treated play- vandal-destroyed Moses boathouse beside the Harlem Meer. staging numerous modest, playfully themed celebrations grounds as independent elements within the overall park In addition, the conservancy oversaw the renovation of all such as Dinosaur Day, which, combined with his aptitude for landscape, we attempted to meld them into the rest of the twenty-two of Moses’s perimeter playgrounds and the trans- aphoristic quips, brought widespread publicity to his admin- park by lowering their tall, cage-like fences. The resodding of formation of the Heckscher, Great Lawn, and North Meadow istration. To satisfy his penchant for naming, he bestowed the Sheep Meadow signaled a renewed appreciation of the ball fields from compacted bare dirt to well-drained, well- monikers that usually bore a relation to parks and nature on Greensward Plan. Henceforth it was used for sunbathing, kite maintained clay infields and grass outfields. staff members and friends. This made them citizens of the flying, Frisbee throwing, and other forms of passive recreation Many of these projects were realized during the admin- realm he liked to call the Emerald Empire, with Central Park instead of active sports and mass events. The Great Lawn’s ball istration of Henry J. Stern (b. 1935), who served for seven being the crown jewel. A master of branding, Stern ordered fields were not removed in order to reinstate Gilmore Clarke’s years under Koch and eight years under Rudolph W. Giuliani new signs with the department’s maple-leaf logo to be placed original design, but their resodded outfields were merged into (b. 1934), longer than any other New York City parks com- at several sites in the park as well as elsewhere in parks a single sheet of grass. Surrounding the Chess and Checkers missioner except Moses. On January 19, 1984, the fiftieth throughout the city. In addition, he installed yard arms on House with a pergola and commissioning the artist Richard anniversary of Moses’s appointment to that position, Stern flagpoles in order to fly the green parks department flag and Haas to paint a trompe l’oeil mural on the exterior of the inaugurated Parks Day, an annual celebration at the agency’s the orange and blue flag bearing the seal of New York City Mineral Springs Pavilion were further attempts to harmonize headquarters in the Arsenal. Although he admired Moses beneath the Star-Spangled Banner. Moses’s architecture with the park’s scenery. as the author of the pools and other public recreation facilities Stern’s most important contribution to Central Park was to Endorsing citizen opposition to Moses’s high-handed he had enjoyed since boyhood, he understood the need for a facilitate negotiations between the city’s corporation counsel approach to city planning, the Lindsay administration had cre- parks ethos more in tune with the environmental concerns of and the Central Park Conservancy’s board of trustees to award ated local community planning boards, five of which have the times. full management responsibility to the conservancy. Under the boundaries contiguous to Central Park. All park projects are terms of the contract, the conservancy raises the bulk of the therefore subject to community board review. In addition, funds for the park’s ongoing restoration and maintenance because Central Park was granted landmark status in 1974, from private sources and is given an annual appropriation

11 based on a percentage of the park’s concession revenues From Playground Tot to Parks Commissioner: destroy the place or each other, the playground attendants who received by the city’s general fund. Since the park is publicly My Life with Robert Moses managed the handsome stone-clad buildings that doubled as owned, final authority over policy rests with the mayor and n October 12, 1937, New York City and federal offi- storage areas and comfort stations brought out knock-hockey the parks commissioner. cials gathered in the rotunda in Riverside Park boards and other game equipment. It was still an era when The career of the current parks commissioner, Adrian at 79th Street overlooking a new marina, with parents let their children go to playgrounds alone; my mother, Benepe (b. 1957), appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg Oroadway entrances and exits to the new Henry Jagna, would send my sister and me across the street to play (b. 1942), has taken place almost entirely within the department. Hudson Parkway running above them. Standing after school, then lean out the window and holler for us when His administration advances the goals of the Central Park at a podium in front of a fountain with jets of water streaming it was time to come home. Conservancy, blending the Moses legacy with previous eras of from the mouths of twelve bronze turtles, Robert Moses and All across the city in that era, the Moses legacy of a well- park design. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia officially dedicated the new cared-for municipal park system was still evident, although it But recently this respect for the spirit if not the letter of Riverside Park and contiguous Henry was beginning to be apparent that the main- past intentions has come under attack by some historic Hudson Parkway. tenance staff was becoming depleted and preservationists who seek an exact restoration of prior build- The park, an extension of the original demoralized. My father, Barry, an architect ings and landscapes rather than a fusion of the park’s differ- designed in the 1880s by Frederick Law and city planner, took us on long walks ent layers into a unified whole. Commissioner Benepe and Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, was created through Central Park. He would point out Douglas Blonsky, the present Central Park administrator and through a massive act of civil engineering. the ornamental cast-iron bridges and president of the conservancy, maintain that this freeze-frame Moses’s chief consulting landscape architect, explain the genius of the park’s design, while approach is unrealistic and ignores the responsibility of park Gilmore D. Clarke, with Clinton Lloyd and lamenting the eroding landscape and broken managers to accommodate a variety of contemporary and Michael Rapuano, covered the New York park benches, many of which were mere future recreational uses in a manner compatible with the park’s Central Railroad tracks running along the concrete skeletons missing their wood slats. enduring landscape. bank of the Hudson River with millions of The huge swimming pools built by Moses Perhaps the firmest declaration of this “perspective mindful cubic yards of fill to create the parkway, a had not yet been closed, as many would be of Central Park’s design and rich history, its precarious past series of sports fields and playgrounds, and a in the following years. As a white child from and our hopes for its future” was articulated in 1981 by Com- four-mile long waterfront promenade. the Upper West Side, I was only a minor missioner Davis in a report denying Christo’s application Not constrained by the cost-cutting curiosity when I went swimming with black for a permit to build The Gates, a conceptual art work of palette of WPA-approved construction mate- and Puerto Rican kids in the nearby pools of saffron-colored banners hung from pairs of stanchions along rials, the Moses men, as the cadre of Harlem. The public beaches Moses had cre- twenty-three miles of park pathways, on the grounds that professionals who carried out the parks ated at Coney Island, Rockaway, Pelham Bay, the park itself is a work of art that was for too long exploited commissioner’s orders were known, created and on Long Island were accessible by mass by the organizers of mass events. In 2005, nearly twenty-five a landscape where pedestrians, bicyclists, Commissioner Adrian Benepe, age 9, transit or crowded family car. I remember years later, Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioners Davis, and motorists could enjoy tree-lined paths, in Central Park, 1966. Notice the broken their wide, flower-edged paths thronged Stern, and Benepe, along with supporters of the Central Park granite and bluestone staircases, and other pavement, bare eroded ground plane with people of all ages, huge stone-clad Conservancy and seven million visitors greeted the installation elegant architectural features similar to and standing water due to the collapsed buildings with ornamental cupolas, and of The Gates as a welcome celebration of Central Park’s rebirth. those found in the European parks and gar- drainage system. majestic breezeways leading to campus-like In summary, Moses saw all parkland simply as available dens originally built by kings and nobles. open-air changing areas. Even a young public open space on which to inscribe his own programmatic This was the Riverside Park that I first encountered in the boy could not help but be stirred by the monumental architec- intentions. He demonstrated this amply by altering parts of early 1960s when my family moved to the Upper West Side. I ture – a blend of the Beaux-Arts and modernist styles. Moses Central Park’s historic landscape in order to fulfill his single played in the lower level of the two-tiered playground at 97th must have wanted you to imagine yourself entering an equiva- agenda of providing recreation facilities. There appears to be Street where there were see-saws, slides, swings, sandboxes, lent of one of the great public baths of ancient Rome. little danger of additional park encroachment now. Nor is it and a huge oval spray shower basin – standard equipment in likely that any of Moses’s additions to the Olmstedian land- the six hundred playgrounds Moses installed throughout the scape will be removed. We are left today, therefore, with a park city. On hot summer days, cold water from upstate reservoirs that is both Greensward and Moses. As such, it is much loved brought relief and delight. Large London plane trees grown and deserving of continuing responsible stewardship. – EBR in parks department nurseries shaded the playground with their canopies of gently rustling leaves. To ensure we did not

12 By the time I was in high school, the decline of the city, litter. Then he went back to sleep in the particularly of its public realm, had intensified. Riding the recesses of the park house and told me to subways to the Bronx every day, I first noticed “Taki 183,” the warn him if I saw the foreman coming. tag of the omnipresent vandal who initiated the graffiti plague I spent Monday to Thursday sweeping up that spread like a virus through the entire transit system. the thousands of beer cans left by weekend The parks were now in dire trouble. Even Central Park, the softball players and, as instructed by the flagship of the system and once the model for other cities, had supervisor, dumped them into the sinkholes descended to the level of a late-night television punch line. on the East River Promenade, where they Its lawns were dust bowls, its Victorian-Gothic structures dete- floated out with the tide, part of the flotsam riorated beyond repair, its walls and monuments smeared of a decaying city. with graffiti. Muggers and drug dealers ruled its pathways. When I returned to New York City from Elsewhere, neighborhood playgrounds had lost their atten- college in 1979, I took a paying job at the dants. All signs of routine maintenance were completely gone. Port Authority bus station and an unpaid In the summer of 1973, I got a job as a seasonal park helper internship at a local weekly newspaper. One assigned to East River Park. Reporting to work, I encountered day my editor sent me on assignment, saying my supervisor, a man who personified the near collapse in there was a new administration in the parks morale of the once-proud parks department staff. He told me department that was up to something inter- about all the established practices for shirking work: arriving esting. I met with Mayor Edward I. Koch’s late, taking a long lunch hour, and leaving early. He gave me a recently appointed commissioner, Gordon sodden, reeking, canvas garbage-collection bag and a stabber Davis, and was then introduced to Betsy and sent me out to pick up what appeared to be a mountain of Barlow, a park advocate and landscape histo- rian for whom Davis had created the new position of Central Park administrator. They laid out for me a staircases, graceful stone walls, Riverside Park under construction. vision of a restored Central Park. Given the state things were and allées of London plane in, their dream seemed like a hallucination. But I was hooked. trees? What about the perennially popular playground where At Betsy’s suggestion I signed up as a park ranger, a corps of I had happily spent so much time as a child? What about young men and women serving as information officers and the parkland covering the railroad track, making it possible for environmental educators. I did not realize it at the time, but me to walk along the river’s edge? These things were clearly we represented Commissioner Davis’s effort to establish an not “Bad Moses.” alternative workforce to the one tainted by past practices. As I stayed on at the parks department and rotated through Today, in addition to me, the senior management of the parks a series of positions, I gained a much more nuanced picture department includes at least a dozen former park rangers. of the Moses legacy. When Henry J. Stern was appointed Back then we saw ourselves as acolytes of Frederick Law commissioner in 1983, he put me in charge of press relations. Olmsted, apostles of a historic preservationist philosophy. We Stern, a career public servant, was fortunate to be in office learned to give tours of Central and Prospect Parks, high- when New York was enjoying an improved economy and lighting their Olmstedian remains while deploring Moses’s Mayor Koch was leading municipal government out of its ballfields, skating rinks, and solid brick boathouses as mid-1970s fiscal crisis. It was now possible to designate funds encroachments on the picturesque greensward. Our attitude could be summed up with this mantra: “Moses = Concrete = Permanent Recreation Facilities = Bad; Olmsted = Pastoral = Flexible Use = Good.” But sometimes bad and good are hard to separate. What about my childhood haunt, Riverside Park, with its sweeping

Riverside Park and the Henry Hudson Parkway, September 1937. 13 within the capital budget to has begun its largest expansion and rebuilding program since park restoration projects. the Moses era. Almost $3 billion has been allocated for parks Like Moses, Stern enjoys in the city’s capital budget as part of Mayor Bloomberg’s plan swimming and has a particu- for the sustainable growth of New York City to accommodate larly high regard for the one million additional residents by 2030. We are working parks department’s public on three fronts: the ongoing preservation and restoration of swimming pools and bath historic parks, the continued rebuilding of Moses’s recre- houses, most of which had ational facilities, and the creation of new parks. In addition, fallen into such severe disre- we have begun planting one million new street trees. pair that they were either The park system has gained approximately 3,000 acres dur- closed or in danger of being ing the Bloomberg administration. This includes 2,000 closed when he became com- that were added with the closing of the Fresh Kills landfill missioner. Working with on Staten Island. The new park envisioned there by Field Mayor Koch and cultivating Operations’s winning entry in a design competition is slated the good will of other elect- to be built over the next thirty years. Another winning design- ed officials, he was able competition entry, also by Field Operations in association to secure capital funds to with the architectural firm of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, is guid- restore all of the great ing the conversion of the High Line, an elevated rail track Moses-era pools. As I accom- once used to carry goods from Hudson River piers to ware- panied him to groundbreak- houses in Lower Manhattan, into a linear park. My staff and I ings and ribbon-cuttings, I are working with the Empire State Development Corporation began to develop an appreci- to realize Brooklyn Bridge Park, designed by Michael Van ation for their scale, archi- Valkenburgh and Associates, and we have participated in the tectural inventiveness, and efforts to create a new park on Governor’s Island since its playful design touches. decommissioning as a Coast Guard base. First Deputy Mayor One day in 1983 while vis- Orchard Beach, July 1937. around the clock during the 1930s, an unparalleled period of Patricia E. Harris, who oversees the mayor’s design excellence iting my stepgrandmother, I park creation and expansion. Among them was a Moses program, has encouraged us to hire the most talented archi- discovered by chance a cabinet full of photo albums of the woman, Marguerite Haynes Embury, Aymar’s daughter-in-law, tects and landscape architects practicing today, and Deputy many works, especially the public works, of her first husband, wife of his architect son Edward Coe Embury, and, with Betty Mayor Daniel Doctoroff has made the creation of new parks Aymar Embury II, Moses’s chief consulting architect for thirty Sprout, one of a small handful of female landscape designers the cornerstone of neighborhood development. Moreover, the years. Excitedly, I turned page after page of glossy black-and- commissioned by Moses to create gardens in public parks. For city’s own enormously able design and construction staff is white photographs of soaring bridges, sweeping parkways, that one night, Moses was almost forgiven the destruction of building scores of new parks. majestic pools, and golf houses that looked like neo-Georgian East Tremont with the Cross-Bronx Expressway and his insen- Riverside Park is still my family’s neighborhood park. When mansions. Delighted with this find, I worked with my parks sitive indifference to the deterioration of the Olmsted-Vaux I go there today, I realize that this great Moses-era creation department colleagues to organize an exhibition, “The Art and legacy. was a harbinger of the current transformation of the entire Architecture of the Moses Era,” in the gallery of the Arsenal. In the five years since I was appointed commissioner by Hudson River edge of Manhattan into a series of highway- The photographs and dramatic pencil renderings we placed Michael R. Bloomberg, a mayor who appreciates the value of related waterfront parks. It is a great satisfaction to see that the on the walls drew many old Moses men back to the Arsenal for parks to communities and to a healthy economy, the agency same kind of careful planning and attention to design details an opening night reception on January 19, 1984, the 50th that Moses lavished on Riverside Park is being devoted to anniversary of Moses’s appointment as parks commissioner. them today. When I reflect on these things, I am aware of what They came with stories of the days when they had worked a privilege it is to be a public servant responsible for the protection, maintenance, and development of the finest park system in the world. – Adrian Benepe

14 View from a Tower in the Park: ot all towers in a park are the same. Certainly, many then included many of the first residents who moved in from At Home in Peter Cooper Village towers in the park have too much tower and too lit- 1947 to 1949: civil servants, hospital staff, insurance company After New York State’s 1942 Redevelopment Companies Law, which tle park, owing to financial considerations. Stingy employees, teachers, optometrists, United Nations personnel, expanded the powers of eminent domain to cover what was then Nmaintenance budgets result in poor upkeep. In low- and people in other middle-class positions. We found life referred to as slum clearance, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia put Robert income premises that may be illegally overcrowded, in Stuyvesant Town or Peter Cooper Village to be as convenient Moses in charge of developing two adjacent middle-income housing imperfectly maintained, inadequately guarded, and home to and pleasant as anyone could expect for a moderate rent. It complexes called Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village. The many tenants under financial and personal stress, the high- has been, in fact, far better than that. Metropolitan Life Insurance Company became the developer and rise solution has proven comparatively cheap to build on tight Design has been an important factor. Living in apartment long-term owner of the project. budgets, but costly to operate in both fiscal and human terms. houses that do not conform to the alignment of the surround- Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village may be considered By contrast, Stuyvesant Town and adjacent Peter Cooper ing streets frees people psychologically, and the separation of forerunners of what are known as Title I slum clearance projects, Village, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company’s partially pedestrian and vehicular circulation within the parklike super- middle-income housing financed by a combination of private subsidized 1947 planned middle-income residential develop- blocks relieves them from the traffic hazards and noise experi- investment and government tax incentives. They and the slightly ments, are havens of safety, greenery, and good construction. enced in the rest of the Manhattan grid. Sound construction later New York City Housing Authority projects for poorer residents Nevertheless, Lewis Mumford, one of America’s greatest writ- and high maintenance standards make a difference as well. are variants of the urban planning paradigm associated with the ers on city planning, was disappointed that they were a group There are kitchens with windows, well-maintained laundry influential modernist architect Le Corbusier. High-rise buildings, of towers in a park. Of course, he did not foresee the beauty of rooms, no floods from faulty appliances upstairs, only a rare sometimes cruciform in plan, are set apart in parklike superblocks. their now mature trees nor compare their amenities with cockroach, mouse, or rat – and this in New York City where They serve many residents on limited acreage, while admitting available alternatives. Mumford’s garden city ideal could be vermin flourish. A squad of private patrolmen deters crimi- health-giving light and air and providing open space for recreation. only partially realized at a time when low rents were essential nals; the crime rate remains low. There are green lawns, flow- In her famous 1961 book, The Life and Death of Great to meet the urgent demand for veterans’ housing and ering trees, shrubs, beds of daffodils, and curving paths American Cities, Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) castigated Robert Moses providers sought an almost-guaranteed return on investment. between the tall buildings. Children enjoy the playgrounds for this type of housing, initiating a reaction to what many people Built on the site of New York’s Gashouse District (so-named that dot the property, and in fine weather, people stroll, parade began to see as wholesale destruction of an older, more tightly because of the large gas tanks that once occupied the area), their newborns, relax on benches, and greet their friends. In woven neighborhood fabric that had social virtues unappreciated by Stuyvesant Town, the larger project, occupies eighty acres from the seven months when New York City’s trees have leaves, modernists. The burgeoning historic preservation movement soon 14th to 20th Streets, while immediately to the north, Peter there is a pleasing contrast advocated landmark designation for entire neighborhoods as well as Cooper Village lies between 20th and 23rd Streets. The traffic- between the green or russet Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant important individual buildings. At the same time, the waiting lists free superblocks comprising both projects contain 110 build- foliage and the red brick Town. for Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town remained long. People ings, 11,200 apartments, and a population who were able to afford apartments elsewhere in the city or homes of over 25,000. Richmond Shreve and Irwin in the suburbs still sought admittance. Modest rents controlled Clavan, architects, and Gilmore D. Clarke, by law accounted for the continuing popularity of these pioneering landscape architect, planned them in 1943 as housing projects. But there were other reasons too. a slum clearance project financed through What was it like to live in a Moses-style, middle-income tower private investment aided by tax benefits. in the park? Carol Herselle Krinsky, professor of art and architec- Unfortunately, Met Life explicitly excluded tural history at New York University, describes her experience as a African-Americans until 1950 despite opposi- resident of Peter Cooper Village since 1963 and the changes taking tion by residents who demonstrated for place since Met Life sold Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town equal access. In most other repects Stuyve- to Tishman-Speyer, a real estate development and investment firm. sant Town and Peter Cooper Village have worked well for sixty years. In 1963 my husband and I felt fortunate to be accepted as Peter Cooper tenants from a long waiting list. The population of 25,000

15 apartment houses that mitigates the monotonous simplicity of portrait of Baudelaire. Lifelong friendships were formed in the Robert Caro and Robert Moses Redux the structures. playgrounds among mothers as well as their children. We For forty years the mayors of New York City and the governors of Good security is another important reason why people chatted about the best Chinese restaurant delivery service or New York State were beholden to Robert Moses because he was enjoy living in Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town. where the children’s resale shop had moved. This sounds like uniquely capable of delivering a plethora of politically popular recre- Until Met Life’s recent sale of the properties to Tishman- small town America, an anomaly in a metropolis where many ation facilities; a network of parkways, bridges, and highways; a Speyer, a global real estate investor, there was a large staff, first people are crowded together and consequently maintain a host of middle-income housing projects; Lincoln Center; and two to vet prospective tenants before they were allowed to rent, respectful anonymity. Yet here we found that neighborliness world’s fairs. And, for the past thirty-three years, Robert Caro’s mag- then to process requests for repairs and to maintain the build- and urban individuality could live side by side. isterial, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography The Power Broker: ings and grounds. The process was similar to that used by the By the mid-1990s, however, Met Life’s outsourcing of man- Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974), which tells the New York City Housing Authority to select the original public agement had altered the character and appearance of story of how Moses achieved this remarkable urban transformation, housing tenants, and it favored intact families. The owner Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village. Further changes has been the definitive text on the subject, assigned in more than checked references, inspected applicants’ previous apartments caused by their recent sale to Tishman-Speyer, which is now two hundred colleges and universities and with annual sales of over to ascertain their housekeeping skills, and made sure that a advertising them as “two iconic properties,” are underway. 10,000 copies. A recent exhibition Robert Moses and the Modern prospective tenant had no police record. Lobbies have new marble revetments, but their floors are no City: The Transformation of New York and its companion vol- Much of the amenity in these projects has depended upon longer washed daily. The new management pounces upon ume of scholarly essays, have helped bring Moses’s extraordinary the character and good will of the tenants who have been will- vacated apartments, changing their kitchens and bathrooms achievements to the attention of a new generation of urbanists and ing to sign away some freedom of behavior in exchange for (more marble there), making these major capital improve- architectural historians.What has been the effect of these two por- well-built, well-kept, rent-regulated housing near public trans- ments to free the units from rent regulation. Electronic front- trayals of Robert Moses’s career on one another and our perception portation. Leases under Met Life’s management specified a door mechanisms requiring identification cards have been of the Moses legacy? Based on attendance at a conference organized number of rules: No washing machines or dishwashers in installed, provoking widespread tenant protests. A small stone by curator Hilary Ballon, professor of architectural history at apartments, no entry to the basement laundry room after 11:00 monument has disappeared from the grounds; its plaque had Columbia University, and a subsequent interview with Caro, the p.m., carpets or rugs required (in consideration of downstairs praised Frederick Ecker, president of the Metropolitan Life editor of Site/Lines attempts to find an answer. neighbors), no walking on the grass (a low chain barrier Insurance Company when these projects were conceived. His around all lawns made this clear), no picnics outdoors, small words vanished along with his portrait, and no wonder, ike his multi-volume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, children allowed in playgrounds only when supervised, because they quoted his belief that middle-class people ought Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the teenagers forbidden to climb over locked playground fences, to have somewhere decent to live in Manhattan. Outside my Fall of New York is a study of the arrogation of power by no pets (silent ones evaded notice), and no air conditioners window maples were cut down, and though they may have L a single individual and its effect on society. By contrast (later, residents of Peter Cooper Village were allowed to install been ailing, I find the shrubs that have replaced them unsight- Robert Moses’s Public Works: A Dangerous Trade, a them). It is small wonder that tenants often referred to their ly. Contemporary playground equipment has been substituted compendium of speeches, editorials, official letters, newspaper landlady as Mother Met! for tired old swings, seesaws, and monkey bars, but most star- clippings, and reminiscences published four years before, can From the start, since many of the tenants were intact tling to tenants who had dutifully kept off the lawns, the new only be found in libraries or in second-hand bookstores. It families of war veterans with similar incomes, there was con- regime has taken away the low chain barriers. Now there are remains, nevertheless, an invaluable record of historical events siderable camaraderie. Mothers sent eight-year-olds to the young families with babies crawling on the grass, sunbathers, and personal accomplishments, and its author’s inimitably playground, knowing there were college-age “playground and people tromping on a landscape Met Life formerly kept pungent and pugnacious prose provides an unequivocal testa- teachers” who coached basketball and kept kids safe. From the pristine. ment of how he wanted to be perceived by posterity. Moses’s earliest years, residents enjoyed potluck suppers, bridge games, With a huge commercial sign on the side of a building visionary influence and iron- and group walks for exercise. There were holiday celebrations, advertising “luxury” housing in what we knew as middle-class willed personality were such Robert Caro. toddler playgroups, events sponsored by the PTAs of the units, we longtime residents wonder about the future charac- during the years he held neighborhood public and parochial schools, sing-alongs, art ter of our community. It is unlikely that former standards for office through a series of displays, blood drives, and patriotic commemorations staged tenant selection are being maintained when the scent of mari- with the owner’s encouragement. There were paddle-tennis juana wafts through a corridor from a market-rate apartment. tournaments and Little League events. A bird-watching group We puzzle over other social changes reflected in the alterations perambulated the property. An annual flea market allowed ten- to our familiar environment and worry whether the city will ants to dispose of outgrown children’s books and baby clothes, allow the new owners to build market-rate housing on the spare dishes, and, once, a book containing Manet’s etched lawns. Or will they become stewards of these desirable towers in a park? What can we tell from their website, clearly meant to attract and inform luxury-level tenants? At least its address is aparkrunsthroughit.com. – Carol Herselle Krinsky

16 overlapping state and city appointments that forty years after in judging the moral and Robert Moses on a beach tour, he was forced out of office by Governor Nelson Rockefeller, we social consequences of his August 1934. feel compelled to reevaluate his role in radically reshaping means. Moses was sarcas- New York City’s built environment. That task has been under- tically unwavering on this different ends, necessitating taken by a team of scholars headed by the architectural histo- point: “If the end doesn’t different means. Yet, while rian and Columbia professor Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. justify the means, what the tasks of the biographer Jackson, Columbia’s Jacques Barzun Professor of History and does?” The hubris with and the architectural histori- the Social Sciences. In mounting Robert Moses and the Modern which he pursued his career an differ, taken together, City and editing the companion book of essays Ballon and as a power broker, putting each can augment the other. Jackson have realized their stated goal: to look at the modern the public, for him an ideal- The good biographer makes city as a historical phenomenon. Their work adds an impor- ized abstraction, above the you feel what it was like to tant visual component to Caro’s biography, although they chal- people, whom he disregard- be in a certain place at a cer- lenge some of his facts and views. ed if their desires clashed tain time, while the good In his introduction Kenneth Jackson takes issue with the with his will, damaged thou- architectural historian pro- subtitle of Caro’s book, The Fall of New York, which he sees sands of lives – many vides descriptions, context, as inaccurate in light of New York’s present economic and cul- irreparably. His inability to images, and analyses of tural vigor. Jackson believes that “had [Moses] not lived . . . recognize the limit to the buildings and designed Gotham would have lacked the wherewithal to adjust to the tolerance of his stubborn, landscapes. demands of the modern world. Had the city not undertaken a self-righteous arrogance Robert Caro is a master at massive program of public works between 1924 and 1970, because he was the one who setting the scenes in which had it not built an arterial highway system, and had it not relo- “could get things done” was the actions of his subjects cated 200,000 people from old-law tenements to new public his undoing. take place. Read the first housing projects, New York would not have been able to claim hundred pages of The Path in the 1990s that it was the capital of the twentieth century, Writing a biography and to Power, the first volume of the capital of capitalism, and the capital of the world.” mounting, cataloging, and his magisterial biography of Caro agrees with Jackson that Moses was not directly contextualizing an exhibi- Lyndon Johnson, and you responsible for the city’s dark years of fiscal crisis, escalating tion are quite different know what it was to grow up crime, and spiraling physical and environmental deterioration. enterprises. Both demand in the beautiful but drought- Economic and demographic shifts – the loss of manufactur- scrupulous research but prone Texas Hill Country ing jobs and suburban flight – destroyed the fabric of many from different sources. The during the early years of the northeastern cities beginning in the late 1950s. But Caro’s biographer interviews the subject or persons who remember twentieth century. Read the introduction to the third volume, notion of New York’s fallen greatness in the wake of Moses’s him or her and pores over correspondence and newspaper Master of the Senate, where Caro provides the key to the entire career is not amiss. Indeed, for a time the city seemed to be files. The architectural historian unearths material evidence book when he paints the picture of Johnson standing with his in a state of free fall. Its decline lasted a full generation, and its from archives: sketches, renderings, three-dimensional mod- chief aide one evening shortly after his election to the Senate subsequent recovery and second rise to preeminence could els, blueprints, photographs, official documents, and on the empty floor of the chamber. After surveying the room’s not have been foreseen. brochures. This is not to say that each confines himself strictly dimensions and the configuration of its space, Johnson reflec- Jackson’s jabs at Caro, however, are merely glancing blows. to these respective parameters, only that their motives have tively made the telling assertion, “It’s just the right size.” To In the end his assessment of Moses is much the same as encapsulate character and evoke time and place in this man- Caro’s: Moses was a gravely flawed but extraordinary human ner and to interview the people he needed to talk with to hear being who, by the circumstances of his time and the forceful- recollections such as this, Caro took up residence in Texas ness of his will, achieved many great things. Their difference for several months at a stretch and once stood on the empty lies in the degree of leniency each is willing to grant Moses

17 senate floor after the day’s business was over in order to see it pictures he painted in words. Now we can see images of the Books classic Man and Nature was as Johnson must have that evening. bathhouses, outdoor cafés, and other recreational facilities that penned in Tuscany when he Similarly, Caro’s writing of The Power Broker necessitated made Jones Beach and the subsequent great public beaches was serving as Abraham being in the places where Moses had lived and worked, and if Moses built along the same lines as attractive as any exclusive Lincoln’s minister plenipo- possible, talking with his subject in his own milieu. He felt it beach club. Orchard Beach in the Bronx, Coney Island in Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa: tentiary to the newly estab- particularly important to experience Jones Beach, the master- Brooklyn, South Beach on Staten Island, and the extensive From Vermont to lished Kingdom of Italy. piece of Moses’s tenure as Commissioner of Long Island State boardwalk and Jacob Riis Park on the Rockaway Peninsula are Italy in the Footsteps of This sabbatical was more Parks, and to interview him in that location. Driving on the presented in all their monumental grandeur through plans, George Perkins Marsh than the typical academic beautifully landscaped Meadowbrook and Wantaugh parkways period photographs, and perspectival renderings. This physical By John Elder respite from teaching that that Moses built to carry people from the city to Jones Beach evidence, when combined with Caro’s prose, makes one realize Charlottesville: University of yields pleasant travel and a by automobile, Caro crossed the causeway leading to the sandy how exciting these beaches were when they opened and what a Virginia Press, 2006 fresh publication. It was a barrier beach separating the ocean and the Great South Bay, boon they remain to the citizens of New York. pilgrimage, which Elder then drove east to Gilgo, the tiny dune community where that But beaches are only part of Moses’s tremendous legacy. When times of reminds us is Moses had bought and remodeled a house. There he saw that Two years after taking office, he opened ten pools in a single transition “a purposeful two walls had been converted into picture windows. Looking summer. Scattered across the city’s five boroughs in mostly prompt us to journey, under- north you could see the Robert Moses Causeway connecting to working-class neighborhoods, the pools could accommodate question life’s taken to recon- Robert Moses State Park on Fire Island, and when you turned, nearly 50,000 bathers in a day. They boasted state-of-the-art narrative, pil- nect with the your eye swept across the dunes to the campanile-like land- equipment, high maintenance standards, and strict manage- grimages beck- sources of life’s mark that marks the entrance to Jones Beach. Moses recount- ment protocols to ensure public health and safety. Playgrounds, on. Such was meaning and ed how he had spent days in a small motorboat exploring the basketball and tennis courts, community centers, ballfields, the situation of strength.” Such inlets of the bay and how he had first dreamed of creating a and sports stadiums are also part of that legacy. Furthermore, John and Rita an undertaking great public beach on the empty pristine shore of Long Island recreation represented only one of the public works realms Elder after their involves ambi- where he and Caro now sat. Later, Caro would visit Jones over which Moses reigned. The story of Moses as parkway, youngest son guity, discovery, Beach alone in the winter to feel what Moses must have felt highway, and bridge builder; Moses the czar of public housing; departed for “indirection,” when he first envisioned how he would transform that vacant and Moses the developer of world’s fairs has been brought into college. John, a and above all, landscape. His vivid description of the place has an unforget- focus by Ballon, Jackson, and their colleagues. The sheer mag- professor of transformation table immediacy. nitude of his accomplishments on these several fronts necessi- English and or renewal. The Although the premises of the exhibition and book Robert tated the exhibition’s division into three museum venues. environmental Mecca of the Moses and the Modern City may have been posited in a some- The great public works legacy of Robert Moses and the cau- studies at Vermont’s couple’s pilgrimage was what revisionist spirit, they support Caro with valuable visual tionary tale of Robert Caro still color the way we live and how Middlebury College, and Vallombrosa, the beautiful, documentation and scholarship that give substance to the we think about New York City. The challenge now is not to Rita, a special educator in ancient, and culturally find another Robert Moses, as some caught in the time-con- the local public schools, renowned forest in eastern suming process of city-agency bureaucracy and community- together sought the opportu- Tuscany that served as a review politics are prone to suggest, but to achieve the political nity to reflect on their model of the environmental consensus to create a twenty-first-century vision for a continu- future. A sabbatical journey stewardship Marsh envi- ously rebuilding city, one that will enrich the public realm to Italy offered Rita the occa- sioned in his brilliant book. with some of the same kinds of benefits Moses conferred sion to reconnect with her The journey described in while protecting the lives of the city’s people with a compas- relatives in Tuscany and Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa sion he lacked. – EBR John the chance to deepen his understanding of pio- neer conservationist George Perkins Marsh, whose 1864

Colonial Park Pool, August 16, 1937. 18 renewed the couple’s com- hailstones, this work close-ups, moves through environmental issues are vidual. Rather it is “the verse and to make ourselves mitment to their own voca- demands close reading and three interconnected land- discussed in terms of the mutual and intimate rela- at home.” tions and to their rural patient reflection. It is a scapes. The first is John and notion of stewardship devel- tionship, extending across Elder’s profound grasp of Vermont community. The slow, mindful walk or Rita’s personal path through oped in earlier chapters. generations, between a the all-encompassing nature latter allegiance is expressed Thoreau-like saunter, not a settings associated with Thus the Elders’ pilgrimage human community and its of stewardship stands out in through participation in freeway rush yielding a glib Marsh. In these surround- returns to its point of depar- place on earth.” And like the bold relief from Al Gore’s local agricultural traditions list of to-dos. It rewards with ings, he, like Marsh before ture, their beloved village of dynamics of a family, it recent Academy-award-win- of maple syrup production many subtle, challenging, him, observes humanity’s Bristol and its rural sur- “grows from error, misappre- ning documentary, An and sustainable forestry. and wise thoughts on a host degradation of the environ- rounds. Wisdom gained is hension, repentance, forgive- Inconvenient Truth, completed Elder is one of America’s of environmental concerns, ment and offers a sobering brought to bear on the land- ness and hope and cannot after the publication of most distinguished environ- including the relationship vision of the stewardship scape of home viewed in a simply be the implementa- Elder’s work. With due mental writers, with a host of between wilderness preserva- necessary to prevent future global perspective. tion of a policy or master respect to its consciousness- significant publications to tion and resource conserva- disasters. The second land- Elder’s sensitive, elegant plan.” It is a “chastened” yet raising power, wide audi- his credit, including tion, the future of Vermont’s scape is a literary one, a prose is a delight, and his “hopeful” endeavor that is ence, convincing animated Imagining the Earth, Poetry recovering forests, and the backdrop of environmental personal stories are moving sustained and nurtured by graphics, and rigorous docu- and the Vision of Nature; nature of environmental writing that stretches across and captivating. His inter- the spiritual recognition of mentation, Gore’s film and Reading the Mountains of stewardship. Elder exchanges the centuries, from Basho’s pretation of Marsh is humanity’s oneness with the accompanying book remain Home; and The Frog Run, the simplicity of linear dis- seventeenth-century haiku to insightful, as is his dialogue world of nature. It is a within the limited purview Words and Wildness in the course for a discursive the odes of the nineteenth- with his peers and “ances- “pledge to love the world in of apocalyptic environmen- Vermont Woods. Like Aldo approach that circles back to century romantics, from tors” in environmental liter- a covenant of loss.” It talism – identification of a Leopold and John Muir, he the roots of its argument Rachel Carson to Wendell ature. Another strength is requires “creative grieving” looming disaster and the grounds his discourse in many times and moves for- Berry, Gary Snyder, Terry Elder’s profound and com- for the mistakes of the past technological response nec- narratives of personal expe- ward again with nuanced Tempest Williams, and a prehensive articulation of and present in order to hon- essary to prevent it. One is rience of place. Among the insight, weaving autobiogra- host of other contemporary environmental stewardship. estly assess “painful realities” grateful for Gore’s effort, of most delightful and captivat- phy with analysis. His dia- authors. This portion of the He rightly observes that that open the way “to a vital course, given the abysmal ing of these stories in his logue with Marsh’s ideas book reads more like a sym- stewardship suffers from a future.” Among its most record of our present latest book are vivid accounts becomes a leitmotif that res- posium than a pilgrimage – karma of negative connota- powerful wellsprings are administration on environ- of harvesting olives in onates throughout the book. not the usual stern gathering tions – hubris, rigid master our “joyful awareness of wild mental matters. But, while Tuscany, exploring Paleo- This dialogue is clearly a of academic worthies we plans, arrogant control of beauty” and our commit- timely, his call to action does lithic caves in France, experi- work in progress, just as our usually associate with that nature, misguided anthro- ment to the cultural and not address the root of our encing the wonders of engagement with environ- term, but one in the ancient pocentrism, and complacent ecological health of our indi- problems. Elder’s more com- Vallombrosa, and exploring mental problems is by Greek manner of a joyful technological fixes. This vidual communities. Its prehensive and demanding the mountains near his nature a continuing process dinner party spiced with need not be. The word four hallmarks are “faithful view of stewardship, requir- home in Bristol, Vermont. demanding constant lively discourse and critical stems, as he notes, from the service” to the human and ing firm commitment to These stories in turn serve as reassessment. thought. Elder’s close read- Old Norse Sti-vardr, keeper nonhuman world of nature, place, risk, and a multigener- points of departure for per- Elder’s rather cinematic ing of this rich material of the house. However, stew- “effectiveness” based on rig- ational consciousness of loss ceptive meditations on many account of their pilgrimage, argues that we are heirs of a ardship is much more than orous historical and scien- and recovery, is more pro- of the major environmental with its rich amalgam of wise, affecting, and powerful the practice of a single indi- tific knowledge, awareness of found, for it goes to the issues of our time. flashbacks, establishing tradition of environmental and participation in the “sto- depths of the environmental In our day of sound bites, shots, slow disclosures, and writing that can inspire and ries” of one’s place, and the one-page summaries, and guide. The third landscape is ability “to take risks” to meet flashing television images present-day Vermont, whose new challenges. In essence, bouncing off the retina like “stewardship is a way to affirm the flow of the uni-

19 crisis, which resides ulti- A detailed discussion would Daybooks of Discovery: tionary theory depended on perplate engravings such as For most British natural- mately in our way of being require an entire book, but, Nature Diaries in Britain close observation and sys- Audubon’s Birds of America. ists who kept journals, a lim- in the world. This simply given the importance of 1770–1870 tematic recording of data. Letterpress books containing ited rural sphere provided must change, and Elder has cities, one expects Elder to By Mary Ellen Bellanca But he and other Victorian woodblock illustrations with ample means for observing pointed the way to that direct the beam of his subtle Charlottesville: University of scientists were not alone in accompanying descriptions the appearance, structure, transformation, one that discourse a bit more towards Virginia Press, 2007. collecting facts and keeping reached a broader audience. and behavior of numerous requires we be coworkers the urban skyline. Instead, records. Their work was sup- Two engaging new books animals, insects, trees, and with nature. As he reminds he limits himself to such Nature’s Engraver: ported and even anticipated tell this story: Daybooks of flowers. Their studies us, we can build our ark but brief remarks as the need for A Life of Thomas Bewick by numerous amateurs who Discovery: Nature Diaries in include the effects of season- should not forget we are the parks near urban areas and By Jenny Uglow saw themselves as part of a Britain 1770–1870 by Mary al change and varieties of flood as well. the teaching role of parks New York: Farrar, Straus and confederation of observers, Ellen Bellanca and Nature’s weather. When abroad, like Elder does not preach; he personnel in inner-city class- Giroux, 2006. each adding to the growing Engraver: A Life of Thomas other travelers, they make invites dialogue with his rooms. Although he writes store of knowledge about Bewick by Jenny Uglow. comparisons with the ideas. These are grounded in from his base in rural During the The first climate, topography, and personal experience and a Vermont, Elder knows cities, course of the deals with the landscape of home. Not sur- sure grasp of the environ- too, having grown up in the nineteenth cen- lives of five prisingly, their observations mental literature. It is unfor- environs of San Francisco tury, a burgeon- remarkable are more trenchant than tunate that the book is and lived in New Haven and, ing community diarists – the those of ordinary tourists. entirely without illustrations. above all, in Florence during of biologists, clergyman- Their prose, sometimes writ- Elder’s gift for landscape his recent pilgrimage. botanists, and naturalist ten or revised with an eye description, with its subtle Burlington, Vermont, is just geologists laid Gilbert White toward publication, is firmly blend of the poetic and the up the road. the foundations (1720–1793); tied to time and place. Even analytical, is deeply engag- Early in the book, Elder for natural sci- Dorothy when colored by anthropo- ing. However, his characteri- notes that a fresh vision of ence as a profes- Wordsworth morphic touches and rhap- zations of such places as stewardship “can flower in sional endeavor. (1771–1855), sis- sodic passages, the topical, Bristol, the Green Moun- new ways within the democ- Most notably, the ter of the poet factual, almanac-like charac- tains, Vallombrosa, and the ratic, feminist, and ecologi- publication in and a literary ter inspires the reader’s pilgrimage church at cal discourse of our day.” He 1859 of Charles figure in her trust in its reliability and Conques, which feature so has cultivated the seeds of Darwin’s Origin own right; authenticity. heavily in his narrative, that flowering to our great of Species altered the view of nature. They studied local Emily Shore (1819–1839), a Thomas Bewick’s enthusi- merit the complementary benefit in the quest for an creation as a unitary divine phenemenona with unprece- precocious girl whose early asm for nature’s wondrous vividness of imagery. He enlightened environmental act and fostered the compre- dented attention and interest death cut short her career as variety is akin to theirs. employed original drawings ethic. This is a work that hension of time as a contin- and were eager to examine a nature writer; the novelist Like the Northamptonshire and maps to great effect instructs, awakens, and chal- uum of unimaginably vast the specimens being brought George Eliot (1819–1880); poet John Clare (1793–1864), in his Reading the Mountains lenges without self-righteous eons. Although, after Darwin, back from voyages of explo- and the poet Gerard Manley Bewick’s career grew in of Home. bombast or simplistic cure- some people were troubled ration or shipped home Hopkins (1844–1889). the soil of rural life. His Also, one wants to hear alls. It is a pilgrimage to be in their attempts to reconcile from foreign colonies. Sub- The second is a biography roots were in the village of more about his understand- joined. – Reuben M. Rainey religious belief and secular scriptions from wealthy of the Northumberland artist Cherryburn near Eltringham ing of stewardship in cities science, others saw the ever- patrons funded the produc- Thomas Bewick (1753–1828), a in Northumberland beside and his view of the role multiplying array of newly tion of lavish albums of cop- master of woodblock carving the River Tyne. When not of cities in the continuum recorded species as evidence whose engravings of animals doing farm chores or work- of wilderness, managed of the Creator’s mighty and birds and vignettes of land, and the urban realm. accomplishment. rural scenes are considered The insights that led works of art today. Darwin toward his revolu-

20 ing in his father’s colliery, Beasts, gave him an opportu- writing was published: specificity as much as Bewick spent his boyhood nity to depict various ani- Gilbert White’s A Natural Romantic feeling, and his roaming, fishing, and sketch- mals and birds – Ass, Bull, History of Selborne. From 1768 sister Dorothy’s Alfoxden and ing the scenes and creatures Cat, etc. – with lively fidelity. until his death in 1793, Grasmere Journals furnished of field, stream, wood, and After he had entered part- White, a country parson, him with a knowledge of barnyard. As a man, Bewick nership with his former chronicled the demographics flora and fauna he could put continued these pursuits master, he made woodcuts of and behavior of various to poetical use. For Dorothy with the same passion as many different subjects, species on a daily basis. In Alfoxden was a record that of his contemporaries some being commissions his specially formatted Natu- of the sights and life of the who were classifying and from owners wishing to ralist’s Journal he amassed Somerset landscape she recording natural phenome- commemorate their race- records of the migratory pat- was about to leave, while the na in rural parishes all horses. This led Bewick to terns of birds; the budding, Grasmere Journals were over England. What they conceive the notion of inde- blooming, and fruiting dates a means of understanding described in words, he pendently publishing a com- of numerous wild and culti- and appreciating those depicted in drawings, and prehensive descriptive vated plants; the sowing and of her new home in the Lake this talent led to an appren- catalog of four-legged crea- harvesting times of crops; District. Her diary entries ticeship with an engraver tures. Drawing farm animals and the ecological effects of “Whitham, A Cheviot Ram Though their works differ describe her frequent walks beginning in 1767. Bewick was no problem, but to cap- wasps, gnats, earthworms, belonging to Mr. Thos. Smith of in tone and style, the other as well as her gardening and quickly found his niche carv- ture images of exotic beasts and other insects. His work Woodhall,” woodblock engraving diarists she treats were other household activities. ing blocks of boxwood into he depended on touring was collaborative in spirit, by Thomas Bewick from A General familiar with White’s pio- Revelation – a “never- small vignettes that served as menageries and engravings and he corresponded dili- History of Quadrupeds (1790). neering work. They also before-seen” occurrence – tailpieces of book chapters. in previously published gently with other amateur knew Bewick’s Quadrupeds was a special joy for Dorothy Thus he entered the world of books. In 1790 after several naturalists. long-lens cameras as well as and Land Birds and read Wordsworth. Like White, letterpress printing. years of work interrupted White embraced Carl the accumulated scientific such publications as Penny she often notes a happy sur- Uglow admirably by the demands of regular Linnaeus’s (1707–1778) knowledge of the past two Magazine, published by prise, such as “the whitest describes the “inky, bustling, business, he brought out recently introduced system centuries, naturalists of an the Society for the Diffusion Hawthorne I have seen this competitive milieu” of A General History of Quadru- of binomial nomenclature earlier age could not have of Useful Knowledge; year.” Like him, she found booksellers, printers, and peds. Its success led him to and made a practice of iden- studied, differentiated, and Naturalist’s Magazine, which sustained intimate contact engravers. She details the embark on a similar project tifying and referring to depicted species without circulated the information with a particular locale gave apprenticeship system and dealing with birds. This species both by their com- these crueler forms of field collected by amateur sufficient scope to an ever- the economic risks involved involved drawing familiar mon and Latin names. biology. observers; and Magazine of expanding understanding of in setting up a workshop. species from nature and col- Indeed, for White and his As the forerunner of and Natural History. In this way nature. The expertise she The market in children’s lecting specimens – both Victorian heirs, taxonomy model for subsequent nature they felt connected to a larg- gained from the natural his- books was growing rapidly stuffed and recently shot – was a critical part of the pur- writing, A Natural History of er enterprise of discovery tory books in the library of during Bewick’s apprentice from numerous sources. His suit of natural history, one Selborne was widely read in and categorization, for nat- Dove Cottage, the home she years, and he was put to eagerly awaited Land Birds, that gave amateurs the status the nineteenth century and ural science had not yet shared with William, gave work carving woodblock published in 1797, was of scientists. Bellanca has never gone out of print. become so professionalized her the power to write with illustrations for such popu- received with acclaim. remarks, “With the power to For this reason Bellanca as to make their work seem authority, and William saw lar titles as Goody Two Shoes, name also came the scien- devotes an entire chapter to superfluous. her as his chief resource Goody Goose Cap, Robinson One year before Bewick’s tific naturalist’s license to “The Nineteenth-Century on botanical nomenclature. Crusoe, Robin Goodfellow, Quadrupeds, the book that turn animals into specimens Cult of Gilbert White.” The ability to identify and Cinderella, Primrose Pretty Bellanca rightly considers by shooting, collecting, and name species was the hall- Face, and various didactic the fountainhead of nature dissecting them.” Today’s mark of an amateur natural- tales modeled on the ever- animal rights activists may ist’s seriousness, but it also popular Aesop’s Fables. An cringe, but lacking our high- served a literary purpose. alphabet book, The New powered binoculars and William Wordsworth’s Lottery Book of Birds and poems relied on descriptive

21 But she was more than her other scenes of rough natur- before longed so much to tifying them according to contributor to the collective sify, Hopkins represented brother’s amanuensis. Her al grandeur abounded. A know the names of things their Latin names. natural science enterprise of nature’s sublimity in such literary gifts were not clergyman like White, Gilpin as during this visit to Ilfra- While in Ilfracombe Eliot her day. By then books on things as the vast and muta- confined to naming plants recorded his impressions in combe,” she declares in did more than scramble natural history were numer- ble sky and described its and animals and describing such books as Observations “Recollections of Ilfra- among the rocks in search ous and affordable, and ingenious beauty in such the charm and novelty of on the Mountains and Lakes of combe,” the retrospective of marine life. She had woodcut illustrations in small phenomena as the everyday things. Threaded Cumberland and Westmore- essay based on her diary. She recently reviewed Ruskin’s magazines had improved structure of a leaf. He was through her diaries are pas- land and Observations . . . on had read White the year third volume of Modern substantially in quality. akin to Ruskin in giving sages, rich in simile, of several Parts of Great Britain; before she went there with Painters in which he prosely- Shore, who had learned sev- natural objects the closest intensely felt scenic experi- particularly the High-Lands of her companion George tizes for truth to nature in eral languages and was possible scrutiny and com- ences, and through her Scotland, which he illustrated Lewes, and with the purpose art. Like Ruskin, she took an widely read, was an eager plementing words with Romantic eye we see “the ivy with aquatint prints. More of helping him on the aesthetic approach, and consumer and author of arti- drawings in order to capture twisting around the oaks like than guidebooks, these pro- marine zoology text he had “Recollections” describes in cles on nature. She was what is verbally inexpress- bristled serpents” and “the moted a discriminating way undertaken, she brought vivid detail the scenery she especially keen on identify- ible. His journal is a testa- moonlight [that] lay upon of seeing. Like John Ruskin along several recently pub- and Lewes saw on their day- ing and describing birds ment to his passion for the hills like snow.” (1819–1900) later in the nine- lished guides, such as Mary long rambles through the seen and heard on her coun- “inscape” – intrinsic charac- teenth century, Roberts’s 1851 countryside. She captures tryside rambles or observed ter, one of his many neolo- The ramble or saunter – a Gilpin Popular the appearance of water as from her window at home. gisms – and the intensity of leisurely walk that is its own flux and the notion of nature In deteriorating health at the his painterly, imagistic, objective – is the typical way, as an unfolding series of end of her short life, she metaphorical prose and and still the best means, of scenes when she describes “a was taken to Madeira by her poetry is fraught with anxi- studying nature close-up. streamlet running between family. There she reveled in ety about words’ ability to Extended journeys are neces- the hills, and winding its way the lushness of tropical convey the “glorious singu- sary, however, to experience among the trees while the scenery and the profusion of larity of things.” More than a nature in its rawer and more sunlight made its way botanical species. She visited student of the behavior of exotic form. Bewick was an between the leaves and the isle of Jersey during species, he watches and inveterate local walker, who A wood- History flashed on the braided rip- May of her final year, where, describes at length the flux also traveled long distances block vignette by of the Mollusca. ples. . . . As we came home after much internal debate of water and the movement by foot, once as far afield as Thomas Bewick of a man walking In her magazine article she again the sea stretching and listening, she identified of clouds. The epiphanies he the borderlands of Scotland. against the wind through wild identifies herself with the beyond the massive hills what she guessed was a blue- gained in this pursuit under- With regard to scenic scenery. numerous tribe of mid-cen- towards the horizon looked throated robin and “quite lie many of his poems. For appreciation as the motive tury Victorian women natu- all the finer to us because we rejoiced at having added this instance, this journal note for travel, the mentor of the taught armchair travelers as ralists, who were botanizers had been turning our backs very uncommon bird to about a cloud formation, “It age was William Gilpin well tourists an aesthetics of and fern collectors for the upon it, and contemplating those I know.” changed beautiful changes,” (1724–1804), author of several nature that was enormously most part. Adopting a playful another sort of beauty.” finds an amplified parallel in books on the Picturesque, a influential in furthering voice, she assumes the nar- An even more rhapsodic the sprung rhythm of: category of scenery found close observation and artistic rative persona of a neophyte, Emily Shore was born in the response to nature’s wonders Cloud-puffball, most notably in the northern appreciation. describing in comic terms same year as George Eliot is characteristic of the torn tufts, tossed pillows / counties of England and The journalist and future her adventures gathering and John Ruskin. One won- journals of Gerard Manley flaunt forth, in Wales, where craggy novelist George Eliot was mollusks along the rocky ders where her passion for Hopkins, the Jesuit priest then chevy on precipices, foaming water- able to gratify both her coastline. She does not nature study might have led and poet. Unlike Shore air-built thoroughfare: falls, hanging woods, and Gilpinesque enjoyment of refrain, however, from iden- had she lived beyond the age or White, who kept journals heaven-roysterers, British scenery and her of twenty. As it is, The Journal in order to identify and clas- in gay-gangs / interest in zoology during a of Emily Shore, written they throng; two-month stay on the North between 1831 and 1839, con- they glitter in marches. Devon coast in 1856. “I never veys her avid curiosity and eagerness to participate as a

22 Bewick and the diarists previously remote parts of Calendar Contributors considered here were living the country to admire the in times of great social and Romantic scenery or indulge cultural change, and their a desire for botanizing and intention in observing and plant collecting, their care- How Green is My City? Although New York is known Adrian Benepe, Commis- Adrian Benepe is commis- capturing nature in image less depredations raised New York Today and in 2030 for its urban density, it is sioner, New York City sioner of the New York City and word may be seen partly environmental concerns, A symposium sponsored by an unusually green city Department of Parks, will Parks Department. His as a response to this trans- especially when the Victorian the New-York Historical thanks to the visionary park discuss the Bloomberg career in the agency began in formation. The enclosure fern craze threatened to Society and the Foundation builders of the nineteenth administration’s commit- 1973 and has included the acts passed by Parliament destroy certain areas. for Landscape Studies century and to the extensive ment to a renewed and positions of Urban Parks were altering England’s Today, when excellent Tuesday, January 15, 2008 recreational facilities Parks expanded park system and Ranger, Director of Natural time-honored rural scenery natural history museums 6:00–8:00 p.m. Commissioner Robert Moses the means necessary to Resources and Horticulture, as ancient commons were exist in major cities, guided bestowed on the city between achieve this end. Director of Art and converted into large land- ecotours are becoming a To register: Tickets for this 1934 and 1968. Steps have Antiquities, and Manhattan Douglas Blonsky, Central owners’ fields divided by worldwide enterprise, and a program are sold through been taken in the past to Parks Commissioner. Park Administrator and hedgerows. Smoke from fac- raft of excellent field guides SmartTix. To order online improve the city’s water and President, Central Park Carol Herselle Krinsky, Ph.D., tories was blackening the written and illustrated by visit www.smarttix.com. To air quality. But is New York Conservancy, will speak is a leading expert on crowded cities as the Indus- professional ornithologists, order by phone please call as green a city as it can and about best practices in park twentieth-century architec- trial Revolution gained zoologists, botanists, and SmartTix at (212) 868-4444. should be? What needs to restoration and management tural history and professor momentum. Fortunately for geologists can be purchased The SmartTix Call Center happen to make it a role based on the work the con- of art history at New York Bewick, Eltringham Com- with the click of a computer is open 9:00–8:00 p.m. model for other cities con- servancy has performed in University. Her books mon still had its hoary oaks mouse, we forget our debt to Monday through Friday, fronting deteriorating partnership with the include Rockefeller Center and its aged alder, ash, and the amateur naturalists of 10:00–8:00 p.m. Saturday, parks and the environmental parks department during the (1978), Synagogues of Europe willow trees growing beside the late-eighteenth and nine- and 10:00–6:00 p.m. Sunday. crisis? past twenty-seven years. (1985), and Gordon Bunshaft the small streams that ran teenth centuries. Nature’s Location: New-York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill through it, and cottagers Engraver reminds us how Jonathan Rose, President, Historical Society, Central will give an overview of (1988). She was president continued to graze sheep, much we owe to Thomas Jonathan Rose Companies, Park West at 77th Street his vision of a greener New of the Society of Architec- raise geese, tend beehives, Bewick, whose beautiful will discuss what actions York by the year 2030 tural Historians from 1984 and grow vegetables on little books were among the first General admission: $18 planners and developers through initiatives concern- to 1986. plots of illegally fenced land. illustrated field guides. Students/Educators/ must take to meet growing ing traffic reduction, new This was a landscape he In Daybooks of Discovery, we Seniors: $12 public expecations for a Reuben M. Rainey, Ph.D., energy sources, new parks loved to draw and a source of share early naturalists’ N-YHS Members: $10 culture of community and A.S.L.A., is William Stone and housing, and improved inspiration for many of his delight as they observe and new standards of environ- Weedon Professor Emeritus water and air quality. most charming woodblock record the previously mental and human health . in the School of Architec- engravings. While rail travel unknown. Foreshadowing Daniel L. Doctoroff, Deputy ture at the University of allowed nineteenth-century technology’s present uneasy Mayor for Economic Virginia. He is a former tourists to escape the sooty relation to nature, we see as Development and Rebuild- chair of the Department of industrial city and visit well the birth of the realiza- ing for the City of New York, Landscape Architecture, tion that species should not will explain what steps co-author of Modern Public only be recorded but pro- the city and the private sec- Gardens: Robert Royston tected and nature’s beauty tor must take to realize the and the Suburban Park, and preserved. Read together, New York 2030 Plan. co-producer of the PBS these complementary books series GardenStory. give us a valuable view of that bygone time. – EBR

23 F e ok Y10024 NY York, New Street 81st West 7 o u n

d Volume iii, Number i f a o Fall 2007 r t i L Publisher: o a Foundation n n for Landscape Studies d Board of Directors: s

c Dominique Browning

a Jay E. Cantor

p Robin Karson e Nancy Newcomb

S Therese O’Malley t Reuben M. Rainey u Frederic Rich, Chairman d Elizabeth Barlow Rogers i

e Margaret Sullivan s Editor: Elizabeth Barlow Rogers Assistant Editors: Thomas F. Reynolds Margaret Sullivan Design: Skeggs Design Contributors: Adrian Benepe Carol Herselle Krinsky Reuben M. Rainey

For more information about the Foundation for Landscape Studies, visit www.foundationforlandscape studies.org, or contact [email protected].